The deepened stream bed, August 2020 and (inset) the same spot in March 2020
It was unlucky Thursday 13th. The heat and humidity had been building for days – on the glorious 12th the temperature locally had touched 30C for the first time in 2020. Something had to give. When the heavens opened around 3pm on Thursday 13th August, Murchington experienced its worst flash-flood in living memory. No one is sure quite how much rain fell in the next hour, probably between four and six inches. As drains became overwhelmed and streams burst their banks many local people had rooms flooded. We were lucky at St Olaves, our house lies well above the stream and we were unaware of the drama till it was all overt. The tiny stream that flows through Murchington from north to south had become a raging torrent as it filled with all the run off. It quickly washed away neighbours’ footbridges that had stood for many years, carrying all before it as its momentum grew. Most dramatic of all, when the flooded stream reached our garden’s Victorian leat system, once used to irrigate summer grazing meadows, it over-topped the low granite walls and plunged straight down the hill to the river. It seemed as though water had a memory, though in truth it was just elemental physics. We had long noted the dry, grassed over inundations scarring the hillside below the leats, now the stream was reclaiming them for itself. And more. The sheer volume of storm water dug out the old stream bed, scouring deep into the sub-soil and wrenching granite boulders from moorings that had probably held good since the last Ice Age. Temporarily, the stream had re-established and deepened its old route down to the River Teign. Within hours only a gentle trickle flowed through the hillside gully and the leat system was again successfully diverting the stream left and right across the hilltop. But it was amazing and sobering to grasp the power of water - we can only be thankful not to live in its path.