Aberfoyle Deluge

Bank corner -  synchronised wading

Flood Sale

Flood and Rescue

Loch below the Covenanters, but the eyesore of the Covenanters remains

Coop closed

Another holiday for the school

Water sports centre, Lochard Road

This is the worst flood since 1950 said the man in waders climbing the steep path behind the school to access the Duke's pass in order to march right back down to the village. And so it was, the water had reached the bottom of the drive at Menteith House and was waist deep along Lochard Road. The school playground was flooded and the Main Street was knee deep with a strong current clearing the pavement of street furniture and almost floating the post vans. The roads service and the Fire (or should that be Flood) and Rescue service were distributing sandbags to the already flooded shops and urging shoppers and voyeurs to get back.

It is not unusual to have floods in November but the rains of last week had swollen the rivers, saturated the ground and a night of continuous heavy rain coupled with a high tide conspired to create a local harbinger of global warming. The minister was moving out today to her new parish in Perthshire, or at least hoping to, but god moves in mysterious ways. Hopefully she will not need to wait 40 days before the removal men arrive. The man in the waders regaled me with stories of the rowing boat that had acted as a ferry in 1950 between the Baillie Nichol Jarvie and Menteith House. A young woman reminded me about the time I dragged her and her brother through the flood in a rubber dinghy and then speculated on whether there would be a real flood sale at Guyana.

Meanwhile, several houses that had never been flooded before were sand bagging furiously as the water lapped up the garden paths in search of thresholds to cross. The early van drivers had been trapped and sat in their cabs, the post did not get through, the children had another day off school. Friends have been calling to check the flood levels. When will they build that levee that was proposed all those years ago?

Jimmy Quinn takes charge