Uppingham by the Sea: A Narrative of the Year at Borth

by John Huntley Skrine

And though they could not see how the tenants of the low-lying hamlet of Ynislas fled to their upper storey as the tide plunged them into twelve feet of water; how it breached the railway beyond, sapping four miles of embankment, and sweeping the bodies of a drowned flock of sheep far inland to the very foot of the hills; yet they saw enough to make them recall the grim memories of the historic shore, and doubt if our fortunes were not about to add a chapter to the legend of the Lost Lowland Hundred.

For an hour the narrow ridge on which the village stands was swept by a storm of foam, while, from moment to moment, a wave exploding against the crest of the ridge, would leap in through the

intervals between the houses, and carrying along a drift of sea-weed and shingle, splintered timber, and wrecked peat-stacks, go eddying down into the drowned pastures beyond. Yet when the ebb came, and men began to count their losses, there were but few to record. The embankment at the south end of the village had been beaten flat, and the road behind it buried under a silt of shingle; the nearest houses to it had been flooded and threatened with collapse, so that the owners were offering them next day on easy terms; from our hospital, which stood in this quarter, the one patient and his nurse were rescued on the backs of waders; the foundations of a chapel, which was building on lower ground, were reported sapped, and a staunch Churchman of our Welsh acquaintance stood rapturously contrasting the fate of the conventicle with the security of his own place of worship on the neighbouring knoll. “If Borth goes, the church won’t, anyhow!” he cried, in self-forgetting fervour. No lives were lost, though several were barely saved. One of our party rescued his dog, already straining at his chain to escape a watery grave; another saved (dearer than life itself) his favourite violin. A fisherman, surprised in his kitchen, was flung down and nearly

strangled between door and doorpost by the rush of a wave through the window. A neighbour was drifted out of his house on the top of one wave, and scrambled back to find the door slammed and held against him by another. Rueful groups of women stood in the street, sobbing over armfuls of what one feared might be drowned infants, but were, in fact, the little pigs which they had plucked alive and remonstrant from the flooded styes. In short, if many were frightened, few could plead to being hurt.

Meanwhile, the boys had found their way from the class-rooms upon bridges of railway-sleepers requisitioned from the station-yard. We could not but enjoy that “something not altogether unpleasing to us in the calamities of our neighbours,” but the “humorous ruth,” with which we contemplated the comical incidents of the disaster was exchanged in good time for practical pity. There was to be another high tide that evening, and how would the village stand this second storm of its broken defences? So the order was given to assemble in the street after dinner, and work at the repair of the breaches. The street looked like an ant-hill, as the workers, divided into gangs by houses, with the housemaster at the head of his gang, swarmed

on the roadway, clearing it from the débris with pickaxe, spade, and a multitude of hands; re-stacking the cottagers’ store of peat-sods, which the waves had sown broadcast; forming chains across the beach to pass up from hand to hand the large pebbles at low-water mark, to build in between the palisades; or cutting down the old stakes and driving in new ones. This last was the most attractive branch of the service. How enviable was he whom a reputation as a woodman secured the enjoyment of an axe, and the genial employ of hewing and hammering! This was much to be preferred to cutting your hands in moving rubbish or standing still to hand wet stones in a freezing wind. However, the pleasure of helping other people was common to all; and many of the young hearts, which tasted that pleasure in this rough day’s labour, will have gained an impulse of prompt helpfulness that may serve them in other and ruder storms than that which shook the frail homes of these friendly villagers.

We do not know how our defences would have stood the test of battle. They were not put to the proof, for the wind, veering to the north that morning, and blowing strongly all day, reduced again the volume of the water in the bay, and the following

tides came and went harmlessly. But had the morrow repeated the terrors of this day, we should hardly have been up to witness them, for (proh pudor!) we rewarded ourselves for our exertions by a lie-a-bed next morning in place of early school.

Elsewhere the storm-wave had worked more havoc. At Ynyslas, a flock of one hundred and fifteen sheep were caught in their pastures, and drowned, the farmer rescuing only eleven. The cottagers were driven to their lofts, while the tide snatched away their furniture, doors, window-frames, and tables, and strewed them along the railway banks. There was flotsam and jetsam on what was now once more the coast-line at the village of Taliesin, where in old days the bard’s cradle had been washed ashore; here one poor woman recovered her parlour-table of heavy oak; her chairs had travelled farther yet to the door of a farmhouse in the extreme corner of the marsh. These people were greater sufferers than our villagers, but we could only help them by a subscription to replace their losses.

For ourselves, we suffered nothing except a temporary scarcity of coals and oil from the interruption of the railway traffic. It was a