The great flood which took place in the valley of Holmfirth in
February last, was in itself a deeply-interesting and awe-exciting
incident. I was curious to visit the scene, while the results of the
catastrophe were still fresh, both on account of the sympathy I felt
with the sufferers, and because of some physical problems which I
thought might be illustrated by the effects, so far as these were
still traceable. I therefore took an opportunity on the 22d of April,
to proceed from Manchester to Holmfirth, accompanied by two friends,
one of whom, though he had not visited the place since the calamity
happened, was well acquainted with the scene and with the country
generally, so as to be able to guide us in our walk. A railway
excursion to Huddersfield, and a second trip on a different line from
that town to the village of Holmfirth, introduced us to a region of
softly-rounded hills and winding valleys, precisely resembling those
of the Southern Highlands of Scotland, as might indeed be expected
from the identity of the formation (Silurian), but which had this
peculiar feature in addition, that every here and there was a little
cloth-making village, taking advantage of the abundant water-power
derived from the mountain-slopes. The swelling heights were brown and
bare, like those of Tweeddale; and there the blackcock may still, I
believe, be found. The slopes are purely pastoral, with small
farm-steadings scattered over them. But down in the bottom of the
dale, we see the heavy stone-and-lime mill starting up from the bare
landscape, with a sprawling village of mean cottages surrounding it,
giving token of an industrial life totally opposite to that which is
found beside the silver streams of the Tweed and its tributaries. When
we passed near any of these spots, we were sure to catch the unlovely
details, so frequently, though so unnecessarily attendant on
factory-life--the paltry house, the unpaved, unscavengered street, the
fry of dirty children. It was a beautiful tract of natural scenery in
the process of being degraded by contact with man and his works.
Arriving at Holmfirth at one o'clock, we found it to be a somewhat
better kind of village, chiefly composed of one or two irregular
streets running along the bottom of a narrow valley. Hitherto, in
passing up the lower part of the vale, we had looked in vain for any
traces of the inundation; but now we suddenly found ourselves in the
midst of ruin and devastation. Holmfirth is only two miles and a half
from the reservoir, and being at a contracted part of the valley, the
water came upon it in great depth and with great force. We found a
bridge deprived of its parapets, the boundary-walls of factories
broken down, and court-yards filled with débris and mud. Several large
houses had end or side walls taken away, or were shattered past
remedy. In a narrow street running parallel with the river, and in
some places open to it, many of the houses bore chalk-marks a little
way up the second storey, indicating the height to which the flood had
reached. When we looked across the valley, and mentally scanned the
space below that level, we obtained some idea of the immense stream of
water which had swept through, or rather over the village.
A rustic guide, obtained at the inn, went on with us through the town,
pointing out that in this factory precious machinery had been swept
away--in that house a mother and five children had been drowned in
their beds--here some wonderful escape had taken place--there had
befallen some piteous tragedy. Soon clearing the village, we came to a
factory which stood in the bottom of the valley, with some ruined
buildings beside it. This had been the property of a Mr Sandford, and
he lived close to his mill. Taken completely unprepared by the
inundation, he and his family had been carried off, along with nearly
every fragment of their house. His body was discovered a considerable
time after, at a distance of many miles down the valley. It may be
remarked, that about 100 people perished in the flood; and out of that
number, at the time of our visit, only one body remained unrecovered.
The catastrophe is too recent to require much detail. It took its
origin, as is well known, in a reservoir of water for the use of the
mills, formed by a dam across the valley. This had been constructed in
1838, and in an imperfect manner. The embankment, eighty feet in
height, sloped outwards and inwards, with facings of masonry, thus
obeying the proper rule as to form; but the _puddling_, or clay-casing
of the interior, was defective, and it is believed that a spring
existed underneath. Some years ago, the embankment began to sink, so
that its upper line became a curve, the deepest part of which was
eight or ten feet below the uppermost. This should have given some
alarm to the commissioners appointed to manage the reservoir; and the
danger was actually pointed out, and insisted upon so long ago as
1844. But the commission became insolvent, and went into Chancery; so
nothing was done. A sort of safety-valve is provided in such works,
exactly of the same nature as the waste-pipe of a common cistern. It
consists of a hollow tower of masonry rising within the embankment, in
connection with a sluice-passage, or _by-wash_, by which the water may
be let off. This tower, rising to within a few feet of the original
upper level of the embankment, was of course sure to receive and
discharge any water which might come to the height of its own lip,
thus insuring that the water should never quite fill the reservoir, or
charge it beyond its calculated strength. By the sluice provision,
again, the water could at any time be discharged, even before it
reached nearly so high a point. Unfortunately, this part of the work
was in an inefficient state, the embankment having itself sunk below
the level of the open-mouthed top of the tower, while the sluice below
was blocked up with rubbish. It was subsequently declared by the
manager, that this defect might have been remedied at any time by an
expenditure of L.12, 10s.! If the commission could not or would not
advance this small sum, one would have thought that the mill-owners
might have seen the propriety of clubbing for so cheap a purchase of
safety. They failed to do so, and the destruction of property to the
extent of half a million, the interruption of the employment of 7000
people, and the loss of 100 lives, has been the consequence. Surely
there never was a more striking illustration of the Old Richard
proverb: 'For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the
horse was lost,' &c.
The night between the 4th and 5th of February was one of calm
moonlight; but heavy rains had fallen for a fortnight before, and an
uncommon mass of water had been accumulated behind the Bilberry
embankment. The vague apprehensions of bypast years reviving at this
crisis, some neighbours had been on the outlook for a catastrophe.
They gathered at midnight round the spot, speculating on what would be
the consequence if that huge embankment should burst. There were
already three leaks in it, and the water was beginning to pour over
the upper edge. A member of the 'sluice-committee' was heard to say,
that before two o'clock there would be such a scene as no one had ever
seen the like of, and not a mill would be left in the valley. Two
persons were then _understood_ to be sent off, to give warning to the
people down the valley; but no good account of the proceedings of
these two messengers has ever been given. It appears as if the very
singularity of the dreaded event created a confidence in its not
taking place. By and by, a breach was made in the casing of the
embankment just below the top; the water then got in between the
casing further down, and the puddle or clay which invested the
internal mass, composed of mere rubbish. In half an hour, a great
extent of this case was heaved off by the water, and immediately after
a tremendous breach was made through the embankment, and an aqueous
avalanche poured through. Men then began to run down the valley, to
waken the sleepers, but the water ran faster. In a few minutes, it had
reached the village, two miles and a half distant, carrying with it
nearly everything which came directly in its way. It is said to have
taken nearly twenty minutes to pass that village--a fact which gives a
striking idea of the enormous mass of water concerned.
About a mile and a half above the village, we came to a modern church,
which had been set down in the bottom of the valley, close to the
river-side. Entering, we found some curious memorials of the operation
of water, in the upbreak of the whole system of flooring and seating,
which now lay in irregular distorted masses, mingled with all kinds of
rubbish. Bibles and prayer-books still lay about among the seats, as
if the people had never so far recovered from the hopeless feeling
originally impressed upon them, as to put out a hand for the
restoration of order. The position of this church and its fate give
occasion for a remark which, if duly remembered and acted upon, may
save many a good building from destruction. It should be known, that
the meadow close beside a river--what is called in Scotland the
_haugh_--is not a suitable place for any building or town, and this
simply because it is, strictly speaking, a part of the river-bed. It
is the winter or flood-channel of the stream, and has indeed been
formed by it during inundations. Unless, therefore, under favour of
strong embankments, no building there can be secure from occasional
inundation. Thus, for example, a large part of Westminster, and nearly
the whole borough of Southwark, are built where no human dwellings
should be. The fair city of Perth is a solecism in point of site, and
many a flooding it gets in consequence. When a higher site can be
obtained in the neighbourhood, out of reach of floods, it is pure
folly to build in a _haugh_--that is, the first plain beside a river.
We were coming within a mile of the Bilberry embankment, when we began
to observe a new class of phenomena. Hitherto, the channel of the
stream had not exhibited any unusual materials; nor had its banks been
much broken, except in a few places. We had been on the outlook to
observe if the flood, and the heavy matters with which it was charged,
had produced any abrasion of the subjacent rock-structure. No such
effects could be traced. We were now, however, getting within the
range of the scattered débris of the embankment, and quickly detected
the presence of masses of a kind of rubbish different from the rounded
pebbles usually found in the bed of a river. There were long
_traînées_, composed of mud and clay, including angular blocks of
stone, which were constantly increasing in size as we passed onwards.
These blocks were the materials of the embankment, which the water had
carried thus far. No ploughing up of the channel had taken place, but
simply much new matter had been deposited. In some places, these fresh
deposits had transgressed into the fields; and where trees were
involved, the bark on the side toward the upper part of the valley had
generally been rubbed off. Not much more than a quarter of a mile from
the reservoir, we found Mrs Birst's mill, or rather a memorial of its
former existence, in a tall furnace-chimney, for literally no more
survives. The deposit of rubbish was here eight or ten feet deep, and
a number of workmen were engaged in excavating from it fragments of
machinery and other articles. They had cleared out the ground-rooms of
the house, though little more than the base of the walls remained. The
scene was precisely like an excavation at Herculaneum. The outline of
the rooms was beginning to be traceable. A grate and a fireplace
appeared. We observed a child's shoe taken out and laid aside--an
affecting image of the household desolation which had taken place. Mrs
Birst, however, and her whole family, had been fortunate enough to
escape with life, although with the loss of all their property. This
mill, from its nearness to the reservoir, as well as the
contractedness of the valley at the spot, had experienced the violence
of the flood in a degree of intensity unknown elsewhere.
The space between Mrs Birst's mill and the reservoir is for a good way
comparatively open, and here some good land had been completely
destroyed; but for two or three hundred yards below the reservoir the
valley is very narrow, and there some extraordinary effects are
observable. The flood, at its first outburst here, has exercised great
force upon the sides of the valley, carrying off from the cliffs
several huge blocks, which it has transported a good way down. Three
of from five to seven tons' weight are spoken of as carried half a
mile, and one of probably twenty tons is seen about a quarter of a
mile below the place whence it evidently has been torn. These are
prodigies to the rustic population, little accustomed to think of the
dynamics of water, and totally ignorant of the deduction made in such
circumstances from the specific gravity of any heavy mass carried by
it. Geologists, who have looked into the great question of erratic
blocks, are less apt to be startled by such phenomena.
Some of these gentlemen will, I suspect, find the transport of blocks
at Holmfirth less remarkable than they could have desired. It is well
known that, while most of them ascribe the travelling of boulders to
the working of ice in former times, one or two persist in thinking
that water may have done it all. The present president of the
Geological Society has endeavoured to shew, by mathematical reasonings
chiefly, that the blocks of Shap Fell granite, scattered to the south
and east in Yorkshire, may have been carried there by a retreating
wave, on the mountain being suddenly raised out of the sea. Now here
is a moving flood, of greater force than any retreating wave could
well be; and yet we see that it does not carry similar blocks a
hundredth part of the way to which those masses of Shap Fell have been
transported, even although their course was all downwards moreover--a
different case from that of many of the Shap boulders, which are found
to have breasted considerable heights before resting where they now
are.
At length, after a toilsome walk along the rough surface of the
débris, we reached the place whence this wonderful flood had burst. We
found on each side of the valley a huge lump of the embankment
remaining, while a vast gulf yawned between. This was somewhat
different from what we expected; for we had seen it stated in the
newspapers, that the whole was swept away. So far from this being the
case, fully half of the entire mass remains, including portions of
that central depression which has been spoken of. There is more
importance in remarking this fact than may at first sight appear. In
the investigation of the mysterious subject of the Parallel Roads of
Glenroy, one theory has been extensively embraced--that they were
produced by a lake, which has since burst its bounds and been
discharged. It has been asked: Where was the dam that retained this
lake? and should we not expect, if there was any such dam, that it
could not be wholly swept away? Would not fragments of it be found at
the sides of the valley--the breaking down of the centre being
sufficient to allow the waters to pass out? When we look at the masses
left on each side of the Bilberry embankment, we see the force and
pertinence of these queries, and must admit that the lake theory is so
far weakened. In the bottom of the breach, a tiny rill is now seen
making its exit--the same stream which cumulatively took so formidable
a shape a few months ago. For a mile up the valley, we see traces of
the ground having been submerged. Immediately within the embankment,
on the right side of the streamlet, is the empty tower or by-wash,
that dismal monument of culpable negligence. We gazed on it with a
strange feeling, thinking how easy it would have been to demolish two
or three yards of it, so as to allow an innocuous outlet to the
pent-up waters. When we had satisfied our curiosity, we commenced a
toilsome march across the hills to a valley, in which there has lately
been formed a series of embankments for the saving up of water for the
supply of the inhabitants of Manchester. About six in the evening, we
reached a public-house called the 'Solitary Shepherd,' where we had
tea and a rest; after which, a short walk in the dusk of the evening
brought us to a station of the Manchester and Sheffield Railway, by
which we were speedily replaced in Manchester, thus accomplishing our
very interesting excursion in about ten hours.
My final reflections on what we had seen were of a mixed order.
Viewing the inundation as a calamity which might have been avoided by
a simple and inexpensive precaution, one could not but feel that it
stood up as a sore charge against human wisdom. That so huge a danger
should have been treated so lightly; that men should have gone on
squabbling about who should pay a mere trifle of money, when such
large interests and so many lives were threatened by its
non-expenditure, certainly presents our mercantile _laissez-faire_
system in a most disagreeable light. But, then, view the other side.
When once the calamity had taken place, and the idea of the consequent
extensive suffering had got abroad amongst the public, thousands of
pounds came pouring in for the relief of that suffering. The large sum
of L.60,000 was collected for the unfortunates; and it is an
undoubted, though surprising fact, that the collectors had at last to
intimate that they required no more. It is thus that human nature
often appears unworthy and contemptible when contemplated with regard
to some isolated circumstance, as misanthropes, poets, and such like,
are apt to regard it. But take it in wider relations, take it in the
totality of its action, and the lineaments of its divine origin and
inherent dignity are sure to shine out.