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.