Apparently they were put up to it by a bunch of Dutch engineers. To be fair the engineering is fabulous given how old it is, provided you don't screw with rive

Apparently they were put up to it by a bunch of Dutch engineers. To be fair the engineering is fabulous given how old it is, provided you don't screw with rivers and allow the drainage ditches to silt up. All the farms and older buildings are on mounds. There are loads of modern estates built on the flood plains - it is madness. I live in Yeovil, on the side of a hill, 40' above the brook at the bottom edge of our garden. Just north is Yeovil Marsh (mostly drained but the name is a clue), yes of course people build houses in a fucking marsh! The word Yeovil was originally Gifle (C7) which means bend in a river in old English. There are of course houses rather close to the river Yeo that get very damp with monotonous regularity. Cumbernauld (guess!) looked charming back in 1986, when we drove past. It still looked lovely about four years ago, the concrete had aged beautifully. I studied Civ Eng at Plymouth Poly back in '89 and our first field trip was to Roadford Reservoir with its smart new dam - built for something like 1 in 1000 year events. Sadly 1 in 1000 year events are more common these days due to global warming. Luckily Dartmoor is pretty stable but really big dams could be severely tested in the coming decades. Ironically one of our remedies - the EV is much heavier than the gas guzzler. That means that multi story CPs could become overloaded. However pre-stressed conc. members are bloody strong and shouldn't fail by exploding, so I shouldn't lose too much sleep! Geology, hydrology and meteorology can be jolly unforgiving.