It's been a little bit wet here in Dumfries & Galloway. In fact, we have had the worst flooding since 1931. It has been raining all week, but on Thursday into Friday we had more than 3in of rain in 24 hours. Fortunately, the house is high enough from the water level that we had no problems there and the new drains into the 'wee field' are working a treat taking the water away.
Janice was down in London on Wednesday and was diverted from London Euston to Kings Cross to get a train to Newcastle and then change for a connection to Carlisle. This meant Brian had to go down to Carlisle for 11pm to collect her.
A bit of a comparison for you here. The top photograph was taken yesterday and shows the flooding coming up to the top of the cattle loading area fence. The lower photo was taken in October 2008 when we also had flooding, but you can see the loading bay is clearly well out of the water. The road to Hightae was so badly flooded that the 'Bus Brig' was competely covered with water and Robert Burgess (local farmer) had to guess where the road was when he set off on his tractor to go to his other farm steading to milk his dairy herd.
You can see how badly flooded the road is on this shot below, the line of trees shows where the road should be.
This sunny scene above is another pic from October 08, taken from the same place, the middle field gate, showing how much lower the water is lying.
The road to Hightae at the bottom corner of the stackyard field.
Here is the Cheese Factory marooned in an ocean of flood water. The Shillahill Bridge was still closed today, Saturday. Brian went to work on Friday in the tractor, even then he found it difficult to find a route. The road at Rashiebriggs was flooded badly, the Castle Loch at Lochmaben had also flooded the road and the Heck Road was also impassable. In the end after several false starts, he went up over by Cockethill (up a very rough track), round by the Moss and the Cemetary and round the back of Lochmaben by Halleaths to get to the factory.
This last picture shows the water in the 'Side o' the Hoose' field, fortunately not too near the house!
We had a futher adventure on Friday, Margaret was due to get the bus from Dumfries to Edinburgh as she and Isabel were flying to London to meet up with Somching and Sunny (friends from Thailand) who are over in the UK for their son's graduation. Of course there was no way to get to Dumfries for the bus or to Lockerbie to try and get a train, so we decided to drive her up.
We thought we would go south towards Carlisle and get onto the M74 at Gretna, then travel north again. However, when we headed to Dalton we found that the road at Dormont Woods was completely flooded, so we had to turn round and go over that terrible track to Cockethill up through Templand and onto the motorway at Johnstone Bridge. I think Brian deserves an award for his amazing 'off road' driving, we also had to do it all on the way back again!
The water has gone down a bit today and has cleared away at the Dormont woods so we got to Lockerbie by the Williamwath Bridge, but it started raining again at lunchtime, so goodness knows how long it will take to clear.
We are hoping that when the New Year comes, the snow and ice will GO!
The frost does make things look quite pretty though.
But this is not a pretty sight! The snow is packed solid and frozen to the ground, yesterday it rained on top of the ice and it was so bad that Brian couldn't get his car up the slope towards Whinneyknowe, he tried to go by Smallholmburn but a truck had got stuck there, so in the end he turned and went via Hightae. Last night it all froze again and we had a small fall of snow, this has given it a little bit more traction, but it is still very slippery.
