Reports from the Solway Firth (1): beauty and violence

 

In many ways, I can't think of a better way to start the day. Last Wednesday morning I had the pleasure of walking on the beach near Mawbray on the Solway Firth, the great estuary that marks the boundary between England and Scotland (Hadrian's Wall comes down to the sea at its mouth), overlooked by the hills of the Lake District and the Southern Uplands. Yes, it was windy and cold, but as the photo at the head of this post suggests, it's a place of extraordinary beauty, a landscape that invites reflection on its story, its testaments. For there is another side to this landscape, one of violence and power.

Why was I so far away from London that morning? To give a talk, that previous evening, a date long agreed on and by the kind invitation of the local Café Scientifique group. The traditional location for the talks was a traditional brewery, which struck me as an ideal location, and I had been looking forward to the event for some time. The Jennings Brewery has been brewing fine ales since 1828, and since 1874 in the location shown in the photo below.

 

A superb setting, under the walls of the old castle, whose well provides one of the key ingredients, and at the meeting of two rivers, the Cocker and, having flowed scenically from its origins in the heart of the Lake District, the Derwent. But it's the Cocker that gives its name to the confluence town where the brewery is located - Cockermouth. Yes, the town that just over two weeks earlier had suffered for its setting, a foot of rain in twenty-four hours causing the two rivers to change their mood and their courses, violently, devastatingly, flooding the town, beauty gone berserk. The Jennings Brewery was under five feet of water.

I contacted the organiser of the Café Scientifique, whom I had known for some time (and you will meet in the next report), most importantly to check on her situation, but also under the assumption that the event would have to be postponed - surely the local residents, enthusiastic as they might be for all things scientific, had other priorities? My friends were fine, on high ground in an outlying village and expressed a determination that an alternative venue would be found and the event would go ahead. Which it did - at a warmly hospitable café (I suppose strictly more appropriate than a "Brewery Scientifique") with mince pies and shortbread biscuits/cookies and copious red wine. The place was packed, most of the audience having arrived before I did, and they were fantastic. Human nature can be wonderful and uplifting.

So, since I had requested - weather permitting - a morning excursion to the coast, there I was on the beach, the timing perfect with sun and an outgoing tide, good company and an enthusiastic dog. But the evidence for violence was also apparent. The weather system and the deluge that had devastated Cockermouth and other valley towns had also hit the coast, where, even under normal circumstances, the tides and currents are immense. My companion, a regular observer of this landscape, described how the rows of rotted wooden fish trap posts that we could see running out across the sand flats had barely been visible before. Huge volumes of sand scoured away and flushed violently up the coast. This process was evident from the dramatic series of large sand waves visible high on the beach, just below the eroding dunes (photos below, dog for scale), their shoreward boundary dramatically linear and all suggestive of high velocity water movement.

 

My friend described how she had found a dead sheep on the beach, washed down the river and along the coast. And then, this reminder of nature's violence struck home with the memory of human tragedy. Down the river from Cockermouth is the village of Workington; there, at the height of the chaos, Police Constable Bill Barker was bravely directing motorists off a threatened bridge when the structure collapsed beneath him. His body was found on the beach just to the south of where I stood that morning, twelve miles from the remains of the bridge.

Tragedy and wholesale devastation as a result of flooding is nothing new to this region - Cockermouth has been hit before (but not on this scale), the local city of Carlisle last experienced major floods in 2005, and the entire area around the Solway Firth was flooded that night a few weeks ago, including large areas of southern Scotland. And historically this has always been the case - the following is a passage from Charles Lyell's classic Principles of Geology, first published in 1830:

One of the most memorable floods of modern date, in our island, is that which visited part of the southern borders of Scotland, on the 24th of January, 1794, and which spread particular devastation over the country adjoining the Solway Firth.

We learn from the account of Captain Napier, that the heavy rains had swollen every stream which entered the Firth of Solway, so that the inundation not only carried away a great number of cattle and sheep, but many of the herdsmen and shepherds, washing down their bodies into the estuary. After the storm, when the flood subsided, an extraordinary spectacle was seen on a large sand-bank, called "the beds of Esk," where there is a meeting of the tidal waters, and where heavy bodies are usually left stranded after great floods. On this single bank were found collected together the bodies of nine black cattle, three horses, one thousand eight hundred and forty sheep, forty-five dogs, one hundred and eighty hares, besides a great number of smaller animals, and, mingled with the rest, the corpses of two men and one woman.

In one of the chapters of my book, a sand grain takes a journey down a river, the Susquehanna, and for the epigraph I liked the following from Ralph Waldo Emerson's “Woodnotes II”

The river knows its way to the sea;

Without a pilot it runs and falls,

Blessing all lands with its charity.

While the chapter includes descriptions of rivers in flood, I felt, that evening last week, that I should start the talk with an apology to the citizens of Cockermouth for an introduction that only shows one side of the fluvial coin. Beauty and violence - the way our earth works.

 

[Cockermouth flood photos The Guardian, Scott Heppell/AP, http://edwardthesecond.blogspot.com/2009/11/photos-and-floods.html, and the British Geological Survey. The complete Principles of Geology can be accessed online at http://www.naderlibrary.com/lyell.toc.htm or http://www.esp.org/books/lyell/principles/facsimile/. Jennings Brewery will be back up and running by mid-January]

 

Comments

[Silver Fox]

Nice post, and very neat that you could be there soon after the flooding and photograph the sand-wave formations. Interesting that Lyell recorded such similar devastation and human tragedy in the same area...

[Beauty Parties]

The earth moves in mysterious ways sometimes! Good read.