Ditching the culvert

Countryside Column for 4^th April

            I looked out of the bedroom window the other morning to see the front garden covered in a sheen of water. Given the recent weather this might not seem exactly front-page news. More on the par with Claud Cockburn’s famously boring headline: “small earthquake in Chile, not many dead".

            But the point is that it hadn’t actually been raining for a few days, so how and why did the lawn resemble a little lake? Donning wellies, I ventured forth to find out. It was as I suspected. The roadside culvert was blocked and water coming down the hill was actually bubbling up out of a drain and flowing into my garden.

            My surprise was limited because this happens with predictable regularity.  In fact it’s been happening, off and on, ever since they filled in the ditches some 40 years ago.

            We used to have a charming humpback bridge over the little river next to my house. It had attractive brick arches and was sufficiently narrow to afford passage to just one car at a time. This had the very considerable advantage of slowing down drivers fearful of meeting oncoming vehicles. And, anyway, if you drove too fast over the hump you were in danger of taking off like those cars in James Bond films.

            Unfortunately boy racers (as my mother dubbed them) often failed to heed the ‘narrow bridge’ sign and then had to slam on the anchors at the last moment. My sister and I, playing in the garden, would place small bets on whether the squeal of tyres would be followed by the exciting crash of glass and metal. Once a car came right through the hedge and ended up on the lawn with mother scurrying to bring cups of tea to the startled occupants.

            Eventually the council decided to replace the bridge with an ugly concrete structure wide enough for two lorries. For a blessed six months during construction no traffic at all ventured down our lane. But when it re-opened, the wider bridge had the effect of encouraging all drivers to behave like boy racers and roar down the hill at excessive speeds.

            At the same time the local authority filled in the ditches and installed the roadside drains. Which always get blocked. And spew out water onto my front lawn. There are times when even I wonder at ‘progress’.