Designed, developed and maintained by
Frank M Law, Andrew R Black, Robert M J Scarrott, John B Miller and Adrian C Bayliss
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The database was launched in July 1998, on a server at the University of Dundee. Comments and suggestions are always welcome - by email to the Chronology Team. The system is described in detail in a published journal paper:
To return to this website in future, please bookmark this page for your convenience - other URLs within the site may change with time.
Purpose
The facility is provided for the benefit of all with an interest in the distant past behaviour of British rivers and all elements of the hydrological cycle. Recent years have seen an increased awareness of the varaibility of hydrological behaviour, resulting from climatic or land use changes, and decision-making is often thought to be enhanced by the use of information from the distant past regarding the behaviour of hydrological systems. The chronology aims to improve access to such historic hydrological information through the development of an on-line resource.
The Chronology is freely accessible for anyone to search and, if you have access to historic records which would complement our existing data holdings, you are encouraged to consider adding them to the database (but see 'Scope' and 'Data protection' first, below).
Scope
The Chronology is intended to contain information which will complement existing instrumental records of rainfall, runoff, snow, etc. It is limited to Great Britain only, and to the years up to 1935 only: no later material can be accepted. It is anticipated that records of exceptional precipitation and runoff events will form the major part of the database, and will be of interest to hydrological practitioners and researchers when investigating the past variability of British catchment systems.
Contributors are asked to add to the database by drawing on reliable sources, such as:
- Contemporary newspaper reports
- Published diaries
- Published accounts of major events
Data protection
Inclusion of any information in the database constitutes a form of publication. Therefore, contributors must be sure that any source materials being added to the Chronology fall outwith the provisions of any copyright restriction, unless the written permission of the copyright owner allows otherwise. Short quotes are likely to be acceptable for relatively recently published material although, as in other cases, the source of quotation must always be given. In the case of any doubt, please email Dr Andrew Black.
To ensure that copyright rules have been adhered to, and to guard against the possibility of spurious data entry, members of the Chronology Team will routinely check the content of the database, and reserve the right to remove any entires as necessary. As a means of assuring the quality of the database, and to allow verification or future query, contributors will be asked for their own names and email addresses. In addition, the unique IP number of contributors' computers will be stored in a hidden file.
By providing these name details, contributors accept that they are willing for their entries to be recorded by BHS under the terms of the Data Protection Act. Your name or email will not be passed to a third party for commercial purposes, however.
Searching the database
From here you can specify a search of the database, or browse through its entire contents. The results of any search will be returned in summary form as a "hit list". The list then allows access to the full detail of individual database records.
When scanning the results of a search, it is necessary to realise that writers of certain eras express themselves more boldly than would occur in Britain today. E.g. the words 'a great flood' in a seventeenth or eighteenth century diary often meant a flood that had gone to bankfull or just over-bank. A 'flood' often meant a spate in our terms now.
Adding records
This allows new records to be added directly to the database. Before adding any record to the database, you must know at least:
- Date of the event (at least the year)
- Location (at least in terms of which major river basin)
- A direct quotation describing the event
- Source of information
If this will be your first contribution to the Chronology, read the full set of explanatory notes first, before beginning to enter data.
You should have also read the 'Scope'
and 'Data protection' entries above.
While entering data, explanatory notes are accessible through Help icons.
Links
- HiFlows-UK - the definitive site for quality-controlled peak flow data for UK rivers. Launched August 2005. Updates flood peak data provided with the Flood Estimation Handbook for c. 1000 gauging stations.
- British Hydrological Society homepage
- NERC CEH Wallingford (formerly the Institute of Hydrology) (home of the UK National River Flow Archive)
- Environment Agency for England & Wales (includes hydrological data tabulations for selected rivers)
- University of Dundee Geography Department homepage
- Digitising History - A Guide to Creating Digital Resources from Historical Documents (Arts and Humanities Data Service)
- Chronology of flooding in Elgin and Forres - Moray Flood Alleviation Group
- GE Source Geography & Environment Gateway
- University of Birmingham: Environmental Information on the Internet
- South West Grid for Learning Rivers project (schools teaching resource)
- Floodarchive.co.uk - photo gallery of some UK floods since 2001, with news section
- Kay's
AS Geography Links - Drainage Basins - curriculum support materials;
sections covering NE (England), River Tay, techniques, Water Resources
- EL AGUA EN INTERNET (Centro Canario del Agua)
Relevant publications
- Black, A R and Law, F M (2004) Development and utilization of a national web-based chronology of hydrological events. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 49, 237-246.
- Rail Safety & Standards Board. 2004. Project T112: Impact of scour and flood risk on railway structures. Report downloadable from: http://www.rssb.co.uk/pdf/reports/research/impact%20of%20scour%20and%20flood%20risk%20on%20railway%20structures.pdf (This project investigated the 'priority rating' system currently used by Network Rail to prioritise the risks of railway structures failing from scour or flood damage. It includes details of 24 past flood events leading to damage to railway infrastructure researched by Dr Duncan Reed of DWRconsult and staff of JBA Consulting.)
- William H. Hand, Neil I. Fox, Christopher G. Collier (2004) A study of twentieth-century extreme rainfall events in the United Kingdom with implications for forecasting. Meteorological Applications, v11(1), 15-31.
- Archer, D R. 1992. Land of Singing Waters. Spredden Press. ISBN: 1 8711739 276. A flood history of Northumbrian and County Durham rivers.
Please send any comments or suggestions to any member of the Chronology Team:
- Frank Law (formerly of CEH Wallingford)
- Andrew Black (University of Dundee)
- Rob Scarrott
- John Miller
- Adrian Bayliss
Credits
We wish to credit the following authors / copyright holders of anthologies who have kindly granted permission to us for the extraction of dated hydrological events:
- Environment Agency Thames Region and Thames Water for Phil Griffiths' chronology of Thames events.
- Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, for parts of their Report No. 8.
- Barry Horton, 4 Hill Street, Totterdown, Bristol BS3 4TP, for parts of his West Country Weather Book, centred on Bristol and Bath.
- The Institution of Civil Engineers for Proc. ICE vol 28 (1964) - floods in the Exe valley.
- R D P Walsh and co-authors for their Cambria paper on flooding in the Swansea Valley.
- David Archer for permission to quote widely from his paper on the flood chronology of the River Wear, and also from his book Land of Singing Waters: Rivers and Great Floods of Northumbria (published by Spredden Press, Brockbushes Farm, Stocksfield, NE45 7W3.
- Ken Tatem, Flood Defences Engineer, Environment Agency, Bridgewater, for assistance in locating Wessex Region flood chronologies.
- Paul J Damari (Weather Communications International, Worcester, WR3 7AY), for extracts from his book, The Herefordshire and Worcestershire Weather Book, published through Countryside Books of Newbury in 1995.
- C H Dobbie and Partners, Consulting Engineers, for their historical researches into the floods of Kendal and Taunton for predecessor organisations of the Environment Agency Regions concerned.
- Dr Hugh Bowen Williams for kindly allowing us to quote extensively from the River Swale (Yorkshire) flood chronology which was part of his doctoral thesis. Entitled "Flooding Chracteristics of the River Swale", it was submitted successfully to Leeds University Department of Civil Engineering in 1957.
- The Newcomen Society, who have permitted hydrological facts in some papers, published in their Transactions, to be entered on this database. That society exists for all those with an interest in the history of scientific and technological disciplines, and can be located through http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/researchers/newchome.htm .
- Dr Lindsey McEwen has done notable work on flood chronologies, including those of the Tweed and Aberdeenshire Dee; we acknowledge the value of papers such as that in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: Earth Sciences Volume 78, p275-285, properly cited as McEwen, L.J. (1987) "The use of long-term rainfall records for augmenting historic flood series: a case study on the upper Dee, Aberdeenshire, Scotland."
- The Journal of Meteorology and its Editor, Dr G.T.Meaden, for permitting extracts of Porter and Schove's paper "An account of the weather in Oxfordshire, 1630-1642" published in Journal of Meteorology [UK] Vol 7 (1982), No. 71, p213-219.
- Local historians such as E V Jones of Newtown, Mid-Wales, who have produced annals for their district which capture environmental extremes amongst a wealth of other valuable facts.
- Cassell & Co., and the author Wilson MacCartur, for extracts from his 1952 book "The River Doon".
- Cassell & Co., 125 Strand, London WC2R 0BB, and John Richardson for brief excerpts from his wonderful book "The Annals of London: A year-by-year record of a thousand years of history", first published in 2000.
- Rex Sawyer for permission to quote from his book, Little Imber on the Down: Salisbury Plain's Ghost Village, published in 2001 by Hobnob Press, Salisbury SP3 6FA
- Dr Philip Barker and his colleague authors, who have allowed us to extract data from their 200 year index of Central Lake District monthly rainfall, which can be accessed in full (as an Excel spreadsheet) here.
We are grateful to Harold Potter for the historical hydrological research that he did over his working lifetime, culminating in Institute of Hydrology Report No 46 "The Use of Historic Records for the Augmentation of Hydrological Data" (January 1978). As a long-time employee of Trent River Authority, his work has particular strength in the events of the Midlands. However, this particular report will be of value to all those who are concerned to pursue long hydrological time sequences, for example, his Appendix A gives comprehensive coverage of dating methods in old documents. The reference list of IH Report 46 is also particularly strong in its ability to go back to original chronicles.
We express our appreciation to the increasing numbers of authors of web timetimes and chronologies for individual towns and villages, many of which bring to a wider audience outstanding floods and droughts.
We express our admiration for those who have collected and republished old riverside photographs; we do not present photos of flooded valleys or towns on this database, but draw attention by recording photo captions that there is a resource 'out there' to be used scientifically as well as aesthetically.
BHS is grateful to Mrs Sandie Clemas (CEH Wallingford) for her care when entering Frank Law's contributions. A good number of those would not have been possible without the advances achieved by the Internet Library of Early Journals (http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/), for which we express our appreciation.
Andrew Black wishes to express thanks for assistance in the development of the software supporting the Chronology - in particular to members of the University of Dundee web administrators group for helpful suggestions, and to Mike Cranston for testing the prototype version.
Permission to use the CEH Wallingford (formerly Institute of Hydrology) map of UK hydrometric areas on this site is gratefully acknowledged.