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The flood reached a speed of 30mph and a height of 25ft. It swept up to four miles inland in the Bristol area, north Devon, Pembrokeshire, Glamorgan, Monmouthshire and Cardiff - and up to 14 miles inland in low-lying parts of Somerset. In our ever-warming, ever-changing planet it’s probable flooding will become more frequent. And if there’s one thing the tropes of ancient stories can teach us,it’s that the responsibility is on us all.
Generally, a tsunami is caused by an earthquake near the shore or underwater. Normal tsunamis usually originate from offshore earthquakes, submarine landslides and undersea volcanic activity, and range from barely perceptible waves to walls of water up to 300 feet high. The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson starts with Moominmamma and Moomintroll on a quest to find Moominpapa. As the story progresses, so the search becomes harder, with torrential rain slowing them down to the point where they have to sail the floods in an armchair. Along the way, they are helped by various magical creatures. The whole story is a sort of parable about community and resilience in the face of disaster.
Ancient creation myths
This article is a summary of a talk presented by Rose Hewlett on Tuesday 4 October 2016 as part of our Tuesday Talks series. Rose was researching the 1607 flood for her PhD at the University of Bristol.
Read more: City at risk of being wiped out by ‘megatsunami’ warns Bristol professor Which cities could be hit by the mega-tsunami if it were to happen? People were writing about the Bristol Channel Flood as soon as it happened. In the 21st century, renewed interest was sparked when a pair of scientists proposed that the huge flood could well have been caused by an underwater earthquake off the Irish coast that funnelled a tsunami up the Bristol Channel.
Reality of UK flooding
Burnham on Sea". Somerset Guide. Archived from the original on 1 January 2011 . Retrieved 10 May 2010. The coastal population was devastated with at least 2,000 fatalities according to one of the contemporary sources. The breaking of the sea bank at Burnham-On-Sea led to some 30 villages being utterly inundated, and their cattle destroyed, and men, women and children besides. The accounts state that 28 people were drowned at Huntspill and 26 at Brean, a death toll that was repeated in many other villages.
It includes eye-witness accounts of a range of extreme weather events in the 1500s and 1600s, including the devastating flood on January 30, 1607. The plot is very energetic and you really get pulled in when the action starts. I also found that Emma Caroll described the tsunami as a person, a big roaring mass of water. All in all, I found the book entertaining in most parts (apart from the start) and very enjoyable. But a tsunami theory was put forward by experts from Bath and Australia in 2004, supported by evidence of deposits of sand, pebbles and shell at various locations around the Severn Estuary where flood waters swept in, including Hill in South Gloucestershire. A team led by Dr Evan Jones from the university’s history department has used digital photography to revisit the tiny and fragile book, catalogued for almost 100 years with the code 09594/1, which means it can be touched once, and then left alone again. As there were no newspapers at the time, the only remaining accounts of the devastation were in the form of letters and pamphlets.In 1607, Henbury was a large ‘hundred’ taking in several parishes, not just where we know Henbury today. It would have included modern day Shirehampton, Avonmouth and Lawrence Weston. Read More Related Articles But there is one description that has been largely overlooked. In Bristol, the flood was a huge event - the worst in the city’s history - albeit it appears that the twists and turns of the Avon Gorge protected the city from the worst of the violence of the water’s speed. Professor Simon Haslett from Bath Spa University said there was currently no tsunami warning system in place. But what exactly happened when a huge wall of water came thundering up the Bristol Channel, and surging up the Avon Gorge to the heart of Bristol city centre?
Thirty villages in Somerset were affected, including Brean which was "swallowed up" and where seven out of the nine houses were destroyed with 26 of the inhabitants dying. For ten days the Church of All Saints at Kingston Seymour, near Weston-super-Mare, was filled with water to a depth of 5 feet (1.5m). A chiselled mark remains showing that the maximum height of the water was 7.74 metres (25 feet 5 inches) above sea level. [3] [4] The wave appeared as “mighty hilles of water tombling over one another in such sort as if the greatest mountains in the world had overwhelmed the lowe villages or marshy grounds. Sometimes it dazzled many of the spectators that they imagined it had bin some fogge or mist coming with great swiftness towards them and with such a smoke as if mountains were all on fire, and to the view of some it seemed as if myriads of thousands of arrows had been shot forth all at one time.” This is very similar to descriptions of more recent tsunami, such as the tsunami associated with the eruption of Krakatau in 1883, where accounts refer to the sea as being ‘hilly’, and the reference to dazzling, fiery mountains, and myriads of arrows, is reminiscent of accounts of tsunami on the Burin Peninsula (Newfoundland) in 1929, where the wave crest was shining like car headlights, and in Papua New Guinea in 1998 where the wave was frothing and sparkling.Obviously Bristol is unrecognisable from the small town of just 10,000 or so people who lived pretty much entirely within the city walls that stretched from modern day Redcliffe Way to the bottom of Broad Street.
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