WHAT have you folk in Perth been up to? Your recent deluge was of
truly biblical proportions and it will be no comfort at all to learn
that in centuries past such misfortune was usually considered a judgment
on the populace for misbehaviour and/or lack of godliness.
Suggestions by officials on Tayside that this was the worst flood
since the beginning of the last century had me scouring the archives for
even earlier inundations and one spectacular flood in 1621 is reported
in some detail. Similarities with the January floods of 1993 are quite
remarkable and seem to suggest that ever since the first rough huts were
built by a ford in the Tay the district has been subject to the
occasional and spectacular ''high tide''.
The seventeenth-century incident began on a Friday in October when the
Tay rose and remained extraordinarily high for three or four days,
causing extensive destruction. The ''beautiful bridge'' newly
constructed across the river in the centre of town was swept away,
leaving only one sad arch in the midst of the torrent.
By the middle of the second night the water had risen so high that
people living in low houses near the Castle Gavel Port were obliged to
move to safer houses on higher ground. Shades here of the problems on
the North Muirton Estate. Bear in mind that Perth was an altogether
smaller place in those days, nevertheless the extent of the flooding is
indicated by the fact that for several days no-one could leave or enter
the town.
Contemporary reports echo through the centuries and mirror the
heartache faced by the people of Perth last month. The Chronicler
reports: ''Children were let down from upper windows into boats in order
to be carried to a place presumably safer. Household stuff and
provisions were destroyed.'' Water seems to have been flowing in the
High Street and Spey-gate like mill sluices and the water level is
thought to have been kept artificially high by a violent wind from the
east.
As such events often do, the Perth flood cast up a hero, one Charles
Rollock, who appropriately guided his rowing boat through the streets
rescuing the stranded and the drowning, a service for which he later
received a ''double angel'' in recompense.
The feeling at the time again shared by the residents last month was
that the Fair City was doomed. Consternation was widespread. It was left
to the minister, John Malcolm, to call the flock together at 7 am on
Sunday, when he exhorted them to repent the sins which had surely
brought this calamity around their heads. Folk were penitent in the
extreme and ''the like humiliation of men and women had not been seen in
Perth before''.
Lo and behold, the waters did indeed begin to drop after this
widespread weeping and wailing, but the general view among the smart set
in Edinburgh was that the flood had been sent as a judgment on Perth,
where ''Episcopalian art-
icles'' had been passed by the General Assembly three years before.
Why the poor folk of Perth should have taken the brunt of this
retribution is not explained.
A nineteenth-century commentator was probably nearer the mark when he
suggested that Perth had been built on a haugh or meadow always liable
to flooding -- ''a kind of situation where no human habitation should
ever be built''.
It would seem the wrath of the Lord and of the ordinary people in 1621
and again in 1993 should be directed at the original town planners.
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