I grew up on the edge of the Somerset Levels and like most people my heart goes out to those living with the floods and their dire consequences. I think we should be doing much more to help now and to prevent this happening in the future, and I get angry with people who fail to recognise the importance of continuing to manage this landscape through dredging and the other new and imaginative means available, like the Belford ‘Back to Nature’ Flood Defence Scheme.
The Somerset landscape has always been managed, including as far back as neolithic times when wooden trackways were built across the flooded land to make it accessible in winter.
Below are three extracts from my novel The Sweet Track – named after one of the most well know of these tracks, the oldest track in Britain – 3800 BC, discovered in 1970 by a peat digger called Ray Sweet – if only it were a best seller then I could have donated profits to the Somerset Emergency Flood Relief Appeal, instead I’ve made a modest donation and perhaps you could do the same if you want to help the people and the animals of Somerset
‘Everywhere the mark of intense activity to drain and resist, keeping the sea out, helping the rivers to carry their upland load, rhynes and cuts, canals and embankments, pumping station and clyse, diverting, draining, defying gravity, reversing the flow of rivers and all the while a constant seeping, a resurgence of water in the hollows, rising up through the soft peat to fill the pits and ditches…’
‘For centuries those living on the land had both acquiesced and wrestled with its vagaries. The struggle to resist the shift of water and silt spilling from the low lying plain filled boots with water and buried spades in slime. Elsewhere farmers welcomed the thick water of flood to replenish fields and guarantee the harvest.’
‘Questions posed were often without solution; sluices and weirs, sea walls and pumping stations were partial. Still the rivers flooded and the sea broke through the defences. A wild land of flooded marshes with myriad islands, secret places where kings might hide, was not easily tamed. A great basin spilling at its rim not easily discharged when its rivers were sluggish and their estuaries silted by the tides.’
