Your Lack of flood protection willputCarseindanger

At the time of previous severe floods, experts and experienced landowners and farmers pointed the finger at the authorities’ failure to dredge rivers and canals and clear ditches and drains.

The bureaucrats, the pen-pushers with no practical experience, had neglected these centuries-old antiflood measures to encourage water birds and other wildlife to return to our countryside.

Now, in the wake of Storm Dennis’s severe floods, an expert wrote: “Forty years ago, I was employed as geologist by an aggregate company to develop gravel pits around the United Kingdom. Under no circumstances would planning permission be granted for any permanent structure on a river’s flood plain.

“Any structure that might restrict the flow of water across the flood plain was prohibited; not even a Portakabin would be tolerated.”

He concluded: “Nowadays entire housing estates are built on flood plains. And people wonder why they are regularly flooded out of house and home.”

Here in Perth and Kinross, we need look no further than North Muirton, Bridge of Earn, Comrie or Milnathort to see the results of bureaucrats and politicians sweeping aside the wise policies devised over many centuries by experts.

Our authorities then wonder why people keep being flooded out of their homes built where once we had only river overflow areas and water meadows, kept that way deliberately by our ancestors who obviously possessed much more practical common sense than our present generation of decision-makers.

The centuries-old arrangements whereby farmers, landowners and local authorities kept ditches cleared and channels dredged no longer survive in the same efficient form in the Carse of Gowrie.

All that fertile farmland and the Carse’s villages will soon be under threat too unless our bureaucrats see the light.

We could be looking at a permanently flooded plain instead of acres of farmland – a return to what the Carse must have been like before the valley was drained.

Clues to its past are in the names – Inchture and Inchyra - inch meaning island, as found in Perth’s North and South inches.

It’s a wonder our authorities have not built on them.

George K McMillan

Mount Tabor Avenue

Perth

Over the bridge PA reader Roland Ballard from Pitlochry captured the last rays of February sunshine on the bridge over the Tay at Logierait. Roland (#rolysart) is a stained glass artist and this image has the strong dividing lines you would expect to see in his work with glass