This story was written and shared as part of the Read Now Write Now workshops which took place during the Look Climate Lab 2022. To find out more about Read Now Write Now, click here.

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Ceridwen, who had lived in Birmingham since University, and now, in her mid-twenties, worked for the City Council’s housing department, was driving to West Wales on a Friday teatime for a summer weekend visit to her parents’ farm and into a gathering storm – literal, not metaphorical.  Now two hours from the English Midlands, and travelling west through Mid Wales, she felt that the cloudburst was imminent.

The afternoon had been humid and luminous, that deep bright green seen just before a thunderstorm.  Swollen trees crushed in towards the road and overhung her little grey hatchback car.  Rhododendrons reached out over the high crumbling brick walls of grand old country-house gardens and displayed ranks of vivid flowers in shades of ruby and violet, like lipsticks on a department-store stand.  Stout apple trees flourished in cottage gardens.  The higher rainfall had made for lush vegetation even in this mountainous area.

Big fat raindrops smacked loudly onto the windscreen like flies.  There was no-one else around.  It wasn’t cold, the temperature was quite pleasant and she wound the window down a couple of inches.

After another half an hour of the A road, she was past the zone of country estates, wedding venues and other indefinable private establishments, turning uphill along a B road where the exposed roadsides were moorland grass and the views were long and filled with high flat ground, sheep and occasional hawthorn trees standing out against the damp white sky.  A second turn took her through a large puddle and across a little green iron bridge and she smiled as she drove downhill again, down the familiar last couple of miles past friendly grey stone cottages with misshapen windows, the quickening rain clattering onto tatty corrugated metal workshops, more and bigger trees, random bits of machinery at the roadside and hand-made signs offering eggs for sale, in Welsh and English.

She had left it too late to ring the farmhouse and announce her approach: no mobile signal out here still, and these days she always forgot.  Funny what you get to take for granted.

She was looking forward to seeing the family, and to her father’s jokes about her leaving the farm for the city: “Just going to get some milk.  You know where milk comes from don’t you Ceri?” and the answering shout from the family around the tea-table: “TESCO!” while Dadi would laugh out loud.  The same joke was applied to eggs, lamb and vegetables at every visit.  But he didn’t really mind, and she didn’t feel guilty about moving away; her brother loved the farm and wanted to stay, and so too did her two teenage sisters, still at school and full of plans for a pony-trekking business.  Ceridwen however loved the city life which had beguiled her as a student.  And now that she had a job, she could afford to enjoy the shops, the gigs, the 4G coverage, social media, and wearing something smart to work every day.

She arrived at the farm gate – always open – and bumped along the unsurfaced drive, winding uphill a hundred yards between the fenced-off fertile fields to the house.  The vertical summer rain was becoming a deluge, so she stopped her car halfway up as she couldn’t judge the depth of the puddles and didn’t want to get bogged down.  The central ridge of the drive was still high but in these days of heavier rain the wheel-ruts were deep and muddy.

“Never worried about that when we were little,” she used to tell her friends, “We used to get up there in Nanna’s old van all year round.  And the horse-box”.

There was a new French drain further along but it didn’t completely resolve the problem.

She put on her waterproof coat and started to walk the remaining stretch up to the buildings but before quite getting there she saw something which was hard to understand.  At the corner where the drive turns sharp left into the broad farmyard, her brother and father were standing under the canopy of the open-sided barn where the van was kept, sheltering, along with a couple of hens.  Something looked wrong about the way they stood, shoulder-to-shoulder, not speaking.  Rainwater streamed along the gutters and out of the downpipe.  Her mother was sitting expressionless behind the wheel of the stationary van.  Something looked wrong about the house too but Ceridwen couldn’t work out what.

Reaching her family, she could see water teeming from left to right across the concrete yard and downhill towards the cowshed, a slower stream of reddish-brown mud snaking behind it.  Nobody said anything but they all knew she was there.  Somewhere in the barn a leak was making a plink-plink sound as drips struck a metal container.  There came a sudden great bang from the house, as a section of tall stone chimney fell forwards onto the slate roof.  An iron gutter clattered to the ground and Ceridwen flinched.  Then she understood what was wrong.  The lovely old Victorian farmhouse – like so many in Wales – had been built on a flat area cut into the side of a hill, and the hillside had been held back with a retaining wall of great stones and boulders.  In this exceptional rainstorm, the sheer weight of the sodden ground uphill had caused that wall to bulge and collapse, falling forward against the house as rainwater rushed through and past, streaming round the corner of the building, while the weight of the fallen wall pushed ever harder on the outside of the back kitchen.  The retaining wall was, although deformed, still in one mighty piece; a six-foot-high structure now leaning against the house, which must inevitably collapse under that weight and under the driving force of the landslide behind it.

Her father turned towards her, his eyes wide and bewildered.

“A hundred and fifty years that wall’s been there,” he said, “a hundred and fifty years and now I don’t even know who to phone”.