A Hundred New Rivers

We have had a dry year so far; January was mild and relatively dry and February was cold and dry, but we have had very little rain. Then at the end of last week, we had two or three days of heavy rain, connected perhaps with the 'Canadian' storms. The river below us burst its banks, and the Moor was flooded. The valley is wide and shallow, and the very bottom of it has extensive low-lying fields and rough pasture alongside the river channel, the very boggy common/wild land called the Moor, a place of reeds and spongy ground, self-sown trees and saplings. Mick the Flower says that they get teal and snipe nesting there, as well as occasional otters. There is a clear fence line which separates this land from the grass lands for the animals, at which point the land begins gently to rise. Over the centuries this has been a managed landscape, and the Moor is left to take the occasional floodings of the Lugg. This happened last week. We could see thin strands of silver through the reeds, pools of water under the trees reflecting the heavy sky. Further up the valley, the Hindwell brook had burst its banks at the Combe bridge (the only crossing point) and was filling the neighbouring field with turbulent dirty water. New streams were running through old stream beds under the bridge and rushing through the snowdrops in the woods. The flooding is expected and controlled at this point in these young rivers' lives, but elsewhere in the county they have had a lot of problems over the last six months or so. Although they'd be short-lived, one expert calculated after heavy flooding last year that Herefordshire had a hundred new rivers.