So where is Datchet?
Our village in the English county of Berkshire. It has been here a long time; was mentioned in Shakespeare's the Merry Wives of Windsor but is much less famous than it's famous neighbour across the river, Windsor, week end home to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth. On a clear Winter's day, when there aren't too many leaves on the trees we can see the castle, from our upstairs bedroom window so we are sort of neighbours. We are not as posh as Windsor even the folk who live outside the castle's walls but a bit posher, we like to think, than our neighbours the other way Slough because we live in the royal borough. Our local council calls itself the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead and can now lay claim to being home to the Queen and our new Prime Minister as well. Half the Cabinet went to school here too but that's a story for another day.
Coming across Datchet for the first time you'd be forgiven for thinking it is the perfect English village. Elizabethan style beamed buildings surrounding the classic village green. The church at the centre of the village and right next door our village pub, the Royal Stag, a proper English local. The Thames flows peacefully (well usually anyway) through the bottom of our village so we have all the ingredients to be the perfect English village. But if you use your ears as well as your eyes you get a slightly different story. We are fifteen minutes from Heathrow, Europe's busiest airport and right under the flight path. Plus we are close to junction five of the busy M4 motorway and to cap it all the village is bisected by a railway line taking passengers from Windsor into London's Waterloo and, four times in every hour, the barriers on the village's two level crossings come down bringing the whole village to a stand still. So the village can be very noisy and is also congested.
More particularly, in relation to its liability to flood, Datchet is down river of Maidenhead, Windsor and Eton and of the £110 million flood relief scheme known as the Jubilee River which was designed to protect those places. The 11.6km, 7.2 mile Jubilee River takes excess water around Maidenhead, Windsor and Eton and puts it back in the Thames, you've guessed it, just before it gets back to Datchet.
Datchet's nine hole golf course sits in the Thames Flood Plain; which is to say an area of land designed to take the excess water when the Thames no longer can. Ahead of the February floods the golf course had been doing its job. It was closed, under water, and we were 'entertained' by pictures of golfers up to their waists in water. A visit to near by Datchet bridge would show you that the Thames, newly swelled by water returned from the Jubilee river, was not taking the bend like it was meant to but was maintaining a straight course and flooding Datchet's golf course.
Fortunately, or so we thought, the water was retained on the golf course by mounds of earth known as bunds. Bad news for golf aficionados but the village was safe. Like I said, What could go wrong?!!
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Flooded - A JustWriteIt TrueStory
Non-FictionFor a few weeks in February 2014 our village was the centre of media attention. The Thames burst its banks and flowed through the Main Street. Life took on a surreal quality. The media descended on us, the army and the fire brigade pitched in and ev...
