On 16 August 2004, more than sixty millimetres of rain - roughly a month's worth - fell on Boscastle in two hours. The village sits at the confluence of two rivers, the Valency and the Jordan, in a steep slate valley with no room to absorb that much water. By mid-afternoon the bridge had washed away, cars were piling up in the harbour, and a man was hanging from a rescue helicopter winch while his neighbours clung to roofs below. Two RAF Sea Kings from Chivenor, three Royal Navy Sea Kings from Culdrose, one more RAF aircraft from St Mawgan, and a Coastguard S61 from Portland made up the largest peacetime rescue operation in British history. Ninety-one people were lifted out. No one died.
Boscastle is the only significant harbour for twenty miles of Cornish cliff. The two stone harbour walls that protect it were built in 1584 by Sir Richard Grenville - the same Grenville who, seven years later, would die aboard the Revenge after an eleven-hour battle against a Spanish fleet off the Azores. The walls turn a natural inlet into an impossibly tight S-curve that small boats can still thread today. The village backs up the steep valleys of the Valency and Jordan, which meet in the harbour. The buildings - whitewashed cottages, the National Trust's Old Smithy visitor centre, the sixteenth-century Wellington Inn whose stained glass dates from 1846 - cling to the slopes. The antiquary John Leland visited in the mid-sixteenth century and called it "a very filthy town and il kept." He was wrong, but you can see what he meant. Boscastle has never been a graceful place. It is a place wrung out of rock and water.
For centuries Boscastle worked as a small port. It imported limestone and coal, exported local slate from four quarries in the cliffs between Boscastle and neighbouring Trevalga, and dealt in whatever else the surrounding farms produced. By 1848 the population was 807. The quarries closed around the turn of the twentieth century. The fishing fleet shrank. By the late twentieth century, tourism had become the main economy: walkers on the South West Coast Path, day-trippers from Tintagel five miles south, and pilgrims to the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic, which Cecil Williamson moved here in 1960 after being driven out of Windsor and Bourton-on-the-Water by arson and dead cats hung from trees. The Museum survived the 2004 flood. So did, eventually, the village.
By mid-morning on 16 August 2004, two weeks of above-average rainfall had saturated the ground. Then a thunderstorm parked over the Valency and Jordan catchments and began to dump. Sixty millimetres in two hours, falling onto impermeable slate slopes, became a wall of water that hit the village from above. Roads were submerged under 2.75 metres of water. About fifty cars were swept into the harbour, where some are still buried in silt. The bridge washed away. The sewerage system burst, and Boscastle was declared temporarily inaccessible. Residents who could not reach upstairs climbed onto roofs and waited. A high tide arrived almost on cue and held the floodwater up against the village for longer than it might otherwise have lingered. More than a thousand people lost homes, businesses, or both. The Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre at RAF Kinloss in Scotland coordinated seven helicopters working flights down the Valency Valley. Witnesses described pilots holding aircraft steady in narrow gaps between buildings while winchmen pulled survivors out of doorways and through bedroom windows. By evening, 91 people had been lifted to safety. No one drowned.
The Boscastle flood was not the first flash flood in Britain, and the storm itself was not unusual for what it was. What was unusual was its arrival in a populated valley with a hard slate catchment, a fast-falling river system, and a high tide. Climate scientists pointed to a pattern: warmer Atlantic air holds more water vapour, and convective storms in a warming climate dump that water faster. Boscastle did not prove climate change, but it made the conversation feel close to home. The village rebuilt. The visitor centre reopened in the Old Smithy. A new bridge replaced the one that was lost. In June 2007 Boscastle flooded again, though less seriously. The local pilot gig rowing club, formed in 2004, named one of its boats Torrent.
If you walk a mile south up the Valency Valley you reach the tiny church of St Juliot, where in March 1870 a young architect named Thomas Hardy was sent from London to oversee the restoration of the roof. The rector's sister-in-law, Emma Gifford, met him at the door. They fell in love. They married four years later. Hardy turned the courtship into A Pair of Blue Eyes, and after Emma's death he turned it into poetry that may be the most beautiful elegy in the English language. The Wellington Inn at the harbour holds church lamps Hardy donated. The valley itself, owned by the National Trust, holds the lanes they walked. The flood of 2004 surged through these same lanes. The lamps survived. The poetry survived. So did the harbour walls Grenville built four hundred and forty years ago. Boscastle has a habit of holding on.
Boscastle lies at 50.684N, 4.693W on the north coast of Cornwall, fourteen miles south of Bude and five miles northeast of Tintagel. From altitude the village's tight S-curved harbour - thanks to Grenville's 1584 walls - is its most distinctive feature, set in a deep slate valley between two steep ridges. The Valency Valley runs inland to the east; the Jordan Valley joins from the south at the harbour. The South West Coast Path follows the headland north and south. Cornwall Airport Newquay (EGHQ) is the nearest commercial airport, about 30 km south-west. Best photographed at 2,500-4,000 ft from the seaward side on a clear day; the slate cliffs and harbour configuration are dramatic in low afternoon light.