It is of course wonderful to live in a place, if not the house, that one truly loves but sometimes when choosing one has to look beyond what one sees to what one suspects or even learns. I remember when digging out the back of the bank to get the soil away from the house, thinking that I had to be very careful about drainage. These old cottages are built straight up from solid stone with no foundations and the inside floors are only about an inch above the outside level. Imagine my delight to realise that the men who built the cottage also knew about drainage and the rain actually flows down the pathway because there is a very slight incline.
Everywhere I built and the materials I used outside were all designed from gravel to porous sheeting, to make sure the water percolated into the hillside with ease despite there being a house here. In fact I learned that most of house building is water management of one kind or another.
Imagine then how I feel for those down the bottom of the hill in the village when the worst rains fell in decades and rivers flooded this week. There are cottages built next to the river utterly lovely in a warm summer day with a gentle flow, utterly terrifying when it is gushing through your back door. And the worst hit places were twenty miles away.
In some ages they wrote stories about night like that:)