My parents came for the weekend, which was nice. They came with me to look at a second hand car, and helped me take my Very Old Bicycle to the tip.
On Sunday, which was an unexpectedly nice day, with sunshine and NO RAIN (for what feels like the first time in weeks) we planned to go over to Glastonbury and walk up the Tor, but when we got there we found that the entire world and his wife had had the same idea, so we kept going, and instead went for a very short amble nearby.
It was a lovely day, so the desolation caused by the flooding on the levels looked beautiful, but the extent of the flooding is sobering. And this was after a drier week. The water has gone down a little from its peak - we could see the 'tide mark' in the fields.
The row of trees is the boundary between two fields, and though it's not easy to tell from the photo, the flooding isn't the only damage - there are several trees down, too.
This is the road. It's just about passable - we saw a young man on a motor bike go through, and it looked as though the water was 6 or 8 inches deep on the road itself, but the roads are higher than the surrounding fields (and there are rhynes (drainage ditches) by the sides of the road which are deeper still)
The sheer scale of it is hard to appreciate until you see it - and it seems unlikely that this land will be much good for any grazing, or even silage making, this year, which will be devastating for the farmers, quite apart from the damage to people's homes.
it also makes you realise just how great a task the monks of Glastonbury undertook, when they took over the draining of the Levels in the middle ages.
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