It has been a soggy day in Wales, with rain only just showing signs of slowing down at 4pm. Heavy rain, like we experienced today, always seems to put a downer on things. I don’t mind rain, but when it is so persistent and lasts the whole day it really isn't much fun. This post is about the huge volume of water and how we deal with it.
Rain is nothing fancy for Wales, but it is rarely this heavy. We are so accustomed in the UK to rain that we actually have dozens of phrases describing types of rain such as; it’s raining stair-rods…don’t ask.
After being inside for most of the day not being up to anything significantly useful I decided to put on my waterproofs and go out with my GoPro to assess the water situation outside. I learnt a lot from this experience such as my waterproof trousers aren’t actually waterproof. But one thing that was useful was that I could clearly see surface water direction. If you are designing a garden or farm then one thing you must do is go to the highest point on a rainy day and observe the path that water takes whilst going downhill. For many people, water conservation is a necessity, but in Wales we do take it for granted.
After 5 minutes of walking around I knew that this was a serious amount of water we were dealing with. Both of our streams had multiple overflowing points. I have never seen anything quite like it and neither had my dad. The track heading past our house was a thriving stream, and some had begun coming into our garden so I had to get a spade and build a couple of barriers to divert the water away.
I then went to the duck pond (pictured below) and the raging water was pushing against the electric fence and had caught many sticks, I don't want to move the fence because it is quite frankly a pain to do, so I removed some of the sticks and I am now hoping that it will be okay. And no the electric fence isn't turned on, that wouldn't be a very clever thing to do.
I then went up into the woods which gave me the biggest surprise of the day. The stream itself had multiplied into 3 streams due to a backlog of water which couldn't get past the tree (on the left in the image below) as normal. There was something that I really liked about seeing water like this. Perhaps it is because I have never seen it there before. In fact in the second image below I used to built small drainage trenches when I was younger because I wanted to go into some kind of construction. If only I would have created those drainage trenches sooner.
Seeing such a volume of water makes me wish we had some kind of hydro-power system to harness all of the energy in the water, but it would be short lived as usually our stream doesn't have enough water volume or slope gradient to make it worthwhile.
Our track is unfortunately quite vulnerable to heavy rain like today. Because of the small stones a lot of it often washes down; blocking our culverts and carving gullies - so we have to keep on top of this by clearing out any potential blockages because the purpose is to get the water of the track as soon as we possibly can. The next two images are a before and after by our bottom gate. You can see that clearing the water channel meant that it now diverted a lot of that water back into the stream. Also note that the volume of water coming down the track has been reduced due to clearing, diverting and unblocking further up our track.
I do apologise for the blurriness but it was raining so hard that I couldn't keep the rain off the GoPro case. I think the images above show that a little bit of work can make all the difference. Our winter weather isn't always that bad, here is an image of our homestead in snow just before Christmas:
All-in-all I spent about an hour battling the elements and I actually really enjoyed being outside with the rain pelting down.I felt fresh and awake, the opposite to how I felt earlier on in the day stuck indoors. Maybe rain isn't so bad after all?