Endless rain has transformed the Severn valley

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jan/01/wenlock-edge-severn

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<strong>Wenlock Edge</strong>

Not so much a deluge as an insistence: constant rain on rain, the wettest year on record, as sodden as it ever could be, flows away. There's no capacity in the land to take more water. Soil is drowned; muddy paths become streams; culverts rumble under streets and pour into the brook. All that rain from the Cambrian mountains, thousands of ditches and the swill from fields, roofs and roads is being drawn by the gravitational force of the river Severn or its Welsh personality – Hafren. From Wenlock Edge looking west, Hafren has reclaimed the riverlands and its floods are a wilderness shining like mercury, even under the greyest rainy sky. It heaved out of the meanders between Leighton and Buildwas bringing huge flocks of black-headed gulls, a strange stillness before crashing through the Ironbridge gorge. At Atcham, where crows and jackdaws pick along its edge, a buzzard hunches in the rain on an old oak in the oxbow, water lapping around its buttresses. From the bridge at Cressage, the river is dirty with Welsh earth and Shrewsbury's sin. It moves across fields with stealth, sloshing like cold tea over gates and fences, an unstoppable force with a crushing indifference. A lone fisherman curses as whatever was bending his rod escapes into the flow. Something catches my eye in the flood by the world war two pillbox.

It's too bright for this scene: cold water, grey sky, mist smothering the Wrekin beyond. The thing sparkles and flashes with light as it slips over the tops of hedges, finding a current. Just as it rolls into the churning and roaring under the bridge arch, I can see it's a mirror ball. On the other side of the bridge, tangled in willow branches, the mirror ball spins slowly, as if intentionally testing the flow for an escape route until it's free, and sparkles off downstream, as TS Eliot says, "a wilderness of mirrors".