The river Wharfe has broken out of its enclosure. Normally lovely, languorous, and impeccably well-behaved, it has mutated in the heavy rain and now runs rampant through fields, climbs high up leaf-littered banks of ivy and alder, and carries huge tree trunks away with it like twigs in a game of Poohsticks.
Scores of people have come out to watch the spectacle, milling around on roads cleared of traffic, friends and strangers alike chatting together. There is nothing like a bit of threatened calamity to get tongues wagging. Usually as translucent as clear beer, the water has turned a monsoon brown, boiling with the force of countless tonnes and churning white as it surges under the five arches of Otley’s bridge, leaving only a tight gap of air. Some houses are already swamped and the water is lapping at the Victorian terraces of Farnley Lane, but its residents seem impressively philosophical – or simply well-insured.
Although realistically it represents little threat to life and limb, the flood gives a glimpse of something fierce and powerful. I imagine the river could easily fold me away if I fell in, particularly the deafening maelstroms under the bridge. But perhaps more significant is the origin of the water: whereas previous floods have often involved snowmelt from the moors and mountains of the Yorkshire Dales upstream, this one is caused by rain alone. One consequence of the world’s changing climate is predicted to be wetter winters for Britain, and every flood now feels portentous.
I walk out of town and up the wooded ridge of the Chevin, where beech trees are losing their last shreds of leaf in the high winds. The top gives a birds-eye view of roads submerged, traffic halted and pastures turned into paddy fields all the way up and down the valley. Like me, people have walked or driven their cars up here to stand on the gritstone boulders of Surprise View and take in the extent of it. They are oddly quiet as they survey the scene. A wild creature is loose in Wharfedale, and it is compelling.
