Day Fourteen

Today it rained again. When Bet and I went out in the morning Nutclough Woods were loud with water. It used to be that you could gauge the amount of rain that had fallen in the night by the stepping stones. If there had been a lot the stones might have nearly disappeared. If they were completely submerged, then it had been really tipping it down. And sometimes there was no sign of them at all except a crease in the water surface where they were disturbing the flow from beneath. Those days you risked a soaking crossing even in wellies, and you might lose your balance in the current.

But this summer’s floods changed all that. The water that came down from the hills in July made everything else seems like kids playing with toys in a paddling pool. That water lifted the stepping stones from their long held foundations and swept them off god knows where. It carried stones, branches, anything even vaguely loose, anything that wasn't the actual bedrock, all the coverings of  earth and vegetation, carried the whole lot before it and dumped it in what we used to call the pond, took some of it on into the town. It carved deep gullies from what used to be footpaths, it crumbled drystone walls, leaving them looking like lace and dust.

The ‘pond’ is a heap of rubble now, with a couple of channels of water running through it. Further up the ravine, the water runs over bare rock where there used to be plants and pebbles. Bet gets confused when places she used to run across easily are suddenly carved deep and she loses her footing. She loves swimming, but doesn’t like it when it happens to her unexpectedly.

This morning I don’t think the stepping stones would have been under water. Only their tops would have been showing, flat stone surfaces with the water folding up around them as it rushed past.

Nobody really knows what Nutclough pond is any more. There have been a few attempts at creating new stepping stones, but none of the stones are impressive enough and there’s no obvious place to put them. The stream hasn’t decided which way it wants to go yet, even though people have tried to guide it by heaping the rubble up in channels. They always break down - each time you go in it’s a bit different.

I suppose time will do it’s thing. Things will gradually begin to grow and colonise the heaps of stone, and they’ll look less as though they’ve been dumped. The stream will find a route it likes and settle. A new footpath will form, and people will forget the way it used to be. That’s the way the world changes I guess. Things happen, stuff changes, we move on.