Savinhill Farm. Flooding in the Lyth Valley

Sunday 6 December. The Lyth valley near Savinhill

​Think of the Lyth Valley as an inlet,  an arm of the sea, was wetland once, is prone to flooding.  The farmers are used to it and adapt. Cumbria gets Atlantic weather, but not rainfall like this. It’s unprecedented.  It’s raining heavily when Farming Today comes on the radio and this morning it's from Kendal and the Lyth Valley, Savinhill Farm with its speciality White British cattle and its Middle White pigs and Saddlebacks.  It took that broadcast from Savinhill to make me look again, to think into my images.  Forget the art of photography, this is misery for farmers in South Cumbria.

---

Farming today interviewed a farmer with dairy cattle on the outskirts of Kendal, whose pastures had been wrecked by becks dumping stones and mud over his grass. And at Savinhill they were pulling their piglets clear of floodwater and a bull had taken refuge up on a manger.  
My pictures were taken from up on Scout Scar escarpment, looking some 200 metres down into the valley.  The zero contours of the Lyth Valley. The farmer pointed out that floodwaters had reached the top of the hedgerows.  The road is gone. 

British White Cattle in the Lyth Valley August 2014

The barn beside the flooded road across the Lyth Valley

A little owl is resident in this barn.  We always  slow to a halt to see if he’s at home, sitting on the roof, on the window sill.  One summer evening , on a farm walk at Cinderbarrow near Levens, a barn owl  was quartering the hedgerows.  Hearing the news from Savinhill I reflect upon the wildlife of the Lyth Valley right now.  The hedgerows are drowned and probably the small mammals for which the barn owl hunts. How on earth ( no earth in sight) can raptors hunt in these floods? 

Making silage in the Lyth Valley in August . The barn beside Helsington Pool