Maeve the Deerhound's Tenth Birthday

6.5C with rain all day. Wind to 24 mph with gusts to 36 mph.

Maeve the Deerhound is ten years old today. Her birthday treat has been to be taken for very short walks in the horrid rainy weather so as not to get her soaked. No birthday trip to St Andrews for a walk along the West Sands today !

I went for a walk before lunch. Jean Michel Jarre on the Nano (Oxygene). Just a 2 mile loop down to the shore road and round the main road and back home. I didn't go down to the beach at Westhaven although I could see from the road to the shore road that the sea was driving in towards the shore from the East/South East.

Halfway down the road to the shore the water is running off the field in a torrent and the road is like a river. This has been happening on and off since the potato harvest. I don't know if the field is saturated and the water table is very high or whether the harvesting has compacted the top layers of soil so the water is running downhill on the surface. Where the crop changed to cereal in the lower half of the field a small ridge/level area where the tractors come in and out of the field and went between the crops has been preventing the water from running or soaking into the half of the field nearer the shore road.

The road drains are just coping but only after the water has run over several of them on the slight slope down towards the shore road. An electricity substation in the field near the point where the runoff is exiting the field has been protected by damming the area on two sides of it with large piles of soil/composted material which the farm workers have recently dumped in the field for spreading before ploughing. Just as well. I have seen the water running through the substation recently and the volume of water today could easily have caused it to fail. If the field isn't ploughed soon some sort of drains will have to be dug to take the water into the lower half of the fields to dissipate and soak away.

E-PL5 f/3.7 1/13 sec. ISO-1600 17mm (handheld)