Rain in Cumbria

It's a Saturday night and it's pouring down. There is nothing unusual in this. Rain is always the foundation of the British obsession with weather. In truth, the average rainfall is not that great and here in the south-east amounts to no more than 25 inches in a whole year. For the most part, of course, rain falls with such a lack of commitment that the rain often progresses only as far as drizzle and serves merely to make walking the streets uncomfortable. But now it has been pouring down on every day for about the last three weeks. Everywhere is sodden and it is conceivable that we may struggle through next summer without a hose-pipe ban. November has entered the record books as the wettest November since records began. These official records only began in 1917 so this is not quite as spectacular as it sounds. Nevertheless, last month was definitely wet with twice as much rain as normal falling across the land. The forces of the weather were by no means equitable in their distribution of the precipitation since some parts actually had less than the normal rainfall. These dry zones were matched by others where the rain fell with a vengeance. There seems to have been a particular divine animosity directed against Cumbria which saw the low clouds tumbling over the Lake District Peaks depositing water like the torrents over Niagara. Borrowdale, the valley that runs down from Seathwaite to Keswick along the shore of Derwent Water is always wet as more than 100 inches of rain fall there every year. The River Derwent starts as a dozen streams in the foothills of Scafell, then runs through Borrowdale collecting more water streaming down from the mountains to become a raging calamity, a deluge elevated from its normal status as a minor river. Last month Borrowdale received a soaking, the like of which soft Londoners could never have imagined. The River Derwent surged along the valley into Derwent Water like a fury, with a ruthless venom and destructive intent as it swept through the lake and turned west towards Cockermouth. Here on one fateful day 12 inches of rain fell in 24 hours - a statistic unequalled in our weather records - and poured more water into the bloated river. As the Derwent passes through Cockermouth, it joins the River Cocker and together these two Cumbrian flows produced a surge of water that flooded the town and its surroundings and swept away all the bridges down to Workington as it rushed out into the Irish Sea.
There were floods in many parts of the country. Tewkesbury flooded as it always does when the water in the Severn rose by an inch or two and places in the flats of East Anglia and the ill-drained corners of Dorset were inundated. But it was Cockermouth that took the worst of it. Of course, the media rushed up there to provide us with pictures, statistics and evidence of the Dunkirk spirit. The army installed a foot bridge at Workington so that the two halves of the town could at least be joined and Network Rail ran extra trains, opening a new railway station, Workington North. Construction of the station began on the night of 24th/25th November; by 28th November the station with footbridge was completed and it opened on 30th November. If only all other projects could be completed so speedily.
We are suffering more extreme weather than we are used to. We have had gales and on Tuesday the night temperatures fell to -7 deg C and we had frozen roads. Then the temperature rose and more rain fell. These variations may be due to nothing more sinister than climate cycles but these are probably being made more extreme by climate changes instigated by Man.
What will deep mid-winter bring?
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