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Seeing the River Spey burst its banks and flooding its flood plain is nothing new here in Strathspey.
What is relatively new is the man-made changes to the river which are making things worse, particularly for those living further downstream.
Pity the poor family in the Moray village of Garmouth who have been flooded out for the 22nd time!
Last week’s floods were in fact not nearly as bad as some previous ones, even from recent years, but a look back to 1829 will see what a real flood looks like.
To give you some idea, at the Inverallan cemetery near Grantown the water rose 15 feet, leaving visible only a few inches of one tombstone taller than the rest. The old bridge lost its smallest arch and apparently no other bridge survived.
One on the River Dulnain certainly didn’t.
The ‘Bridge of Curr’ or Dulnain Bridge, as it is now called, was completely swept away.
The big difference between then and now is that the river hadn’t been banked up.
It naturally spread across all the fields and, as reports from the time say, ‘for miles above Grantown the river, having been converted into a temporary lake, acted as a compensation pond and saved the banks for many miles below, with no damage having been done’.
The river, when it fell, also didn’t leave fields flooded for months as it does now.
I know anglers who may be worried about the effect on the wild salmon when the river rises so far, but the truth is that given the fish haven’t spawned yet it makes very little difference.
What we have done to our rivers, though, has helped make the salmon an endangered species, so it was encouraging to see that the new 50p coin will have the king of fish on it.
This was of course the idea of the King.
Charles is a keen angler and has been a regular visitor to the Spey for many years and he has ensured other endangered species such as the red squirrel and capercaillie appear too.
If Charles was allowed to speak the truth he would no doubt support campaigns to save our salmon, especially here on the Spey, and to be rid of all the man-made barriers like the Spey dam which are so damaging for wild fish.
To absent friends
Who can blame our local MSP Kate Forbes for finding something better to do than attend the SNP conference wake in Aberdeen?
As more and more people reject their narrow nationalism and separatist ideas in favour of uniting against this terrible Tory government, Forbes is sensibly distancing herself from her party.
She, of course, is not the only one, with veteran nationalist Fergus Ewing also at loggerheads with the SNP big wigs.
His latest complaint is over the Nats’ policy to hit second home-owners with double council tax. In the Highlands there are many second homes and this can be a blight on small communities as hundreds of empty houses means closed shops, pubs, schools and those who live and work here unable to afford a house.
When I stood to be a Labour councillor this was a policy I advocated and welcome it. The Tories and their rich friends oppose it, of course, which is why so many people rightly now see Ewing and Forbes as ‘Tartan Tories’.
• Charlie Whelan (Labour) is former spokesman for Gordon Brown
