There were forty one houses in Nether Combe when they flooded it in 1937. I have the tithe map. I have counted the footings out of the mud four times in my life, and this August there were forty two.
They flooded Nether Combe in 1937.
That is not a secret and it is not a legend. It is a matter of public record, in the minutes of a water board that does not exist any more, and it happened to about sixty villages in this country between the wars. They needed water for a city forty miles away, they had a valley with a river in it and two hundred people, and the two hundred people lost.
The village was cleared in the spring. The buildings were not demolished, which people assume, they were taken down to about waist height, because a standing building traps silt and rots and fouls the water. Roofs off, timbers out, walls dropped.
Then they closed the valve.
It took eleven months to fill.
My family were not from there. I want to say that, because when you tell this people assume you are the descendant of somebody who lost a house, and it is a better story if you are, and I am not. My grandparents came to the next village in 1952 for the quarry.
But everybody who grows up around that water knows about the village, and everybody has been down there when it comes back.
It comes back in a drought.
Not every dry summer. It needs a proper one, the kind that makes the news, where the water company puts a hosepipe ban on in May and the reservoir gets down past sixty per cent. Then the bed at the top end starts to show, and if it keeps going, the village comes out of the mud.
In my lifetime that has happened in 1976, 1995, 2018 and this year.
I was six in 1976 and I remember almost nothing except the smell, which is not water, it is the underneath of water, and once you have had it in your nose you never mistake it.
In 1995 I was twenty five and I went down with my dad and a torch and we stayed too long and got shouted at by a man in a van.
In 2018 I went down with a map.
That is when it stopped being an outing. A friend at the records office found me a copy of the tithe apportionment map for the parish, redrawn in 1901, and it shows every plot and every building, numbered, with a schedule that says who owned what and who lived in it.
Forty one houses. A chapel with a burial ground behind it. A school with a schoolhouse attached, which counts as one. A smithy. Two barns and a linhay down by where the river came in.
I walked it with the map in a plastic wallet and I found all of it.
You have to understand what walking it is actually like, because it is not like a ruin.
There is no vertical anything. It is a plan drawn on a valley floor in grey stone, ankle high, filled and half filled with silt, and the lanes between the plots are the only reason you can read it at all: the lanes are compacted and the plots are not, so the lanes stay firm under your boots and the plots take your foot.
You navigate it by walking the lanes.
The main one runs roughly north from where the ford was, up past the chapel on the left, then eleven houses on the right in a terrace, and then it bends and there are the bigger plots, the ones with gardens, and at the very end there is a turning place and a gate post and then it is the old fields.
That is on the map. That is what is on the ground.
This August the reservoir got to forty four per cent.
That is lower than 2018 and lower than 1995, and I do not know about 1976 because nobody was measuring the same way. It was in the papers. There were people down there with metal detectors, which is illegal and which the water company did nothing about, and there was a man selling ice creams in the car park who had never been there before in his life.
I went at six in the morning on a Tuesday to avoid all of it.
I had the same map, in the same plastic wallet, which is now cracked along one fold.
I walked it the way I always walk it, from the ford, north, chapel on the left, and I counted, because counting is what I do down there. It is how you check the map against the ground when everything is the same colour.
Chapel. School and schoolhouse. Smithy. Terrace of eleven. Then the bend.
And then twelve plots on that stretch, not eleven.
I counted it four times.
The first time I assumed I had counted a barn. The second time I walked it backwards from the gate post. The third time I did it with a stick, touching each footing as I passed it, out loud, like a child.
Twelve.
The extra one is the last on the left before the turning place. On the map that position is blank: the map shows the lane bending, the last of the garden plots on the right, and nothing at all on the left before the field boundary.
On the ground there is a rectangle of grey stone about eight metres by five with a doorway gap in the long side facing the lane.
It is not a barn.
I know that because of the hearth.
Every dwelling down there has one and you can find it if you clear a bit of silt with your hands, which I have done more times than I would admit to a water company employee. It is a slab, sometimes two, set flat, usually reddened, at the middle of one gable end. Barns do not have them. The smithy has something much bigger and different.
That plot has a hearth slab, at the north end, reddened.
It also has a threshold. A single long stone across the doorway gap, worn into a dip in the middle, which is what a threshold looks like after a hundred years of people.
Somebody lived there for a long time.
I have spent the autumn on the records and I want to give you the negative results properly, because they are most of what I have.
The 1901 tithe redraw: forty one dwellings, nothing at that plot. The 1841 tithe apportionment itself, which I got to look at in October: forty three dwellings, and one of them is on that side of the lane at the end. It is plot 88. The schedule gives an owner and gives the occupier as the same name, and the description is house and garden.
So it existed in 1841 and not in 1901. That is completely ordinary. Houses fall down and get cleared and the plot goes back to garden, and it happened everywhere and it means nothing.
Except that the footings are there, and the threshold is worn, and a house that came down before 1901 does not get its walls taken to waist height by a demolition gang in 1937, and every other footing in that valley is at waist height because that is what the gang did.
Plot 88 is at waist height.
The name in the 1841 schedule is a common one round here and I am not going to give it, and that is a decision I have made and I will hold to it.
I looked for the burials. The chapel register survives, in the county record office, on microfilm, and it runs from 1798 to 1936.
There is nobody of that name in it.
Not baptised, not married, not buried. In a parish of two hundred people over a hundred and thirty eight years, a family that owned and occupied a house at the end of the lane does not appear once in the only register the village kept.
The rain came back at the end of October.
It came properly, three weeks of it, and the reservoir is at seventy something now and the village is under about eleven metres of water and will stay there until the next one.
I have photographs. They are terrible. Grey stone on grey silt under a white sky, and if you have not stood there you cannot tell one rectangle from another, and I have shown them to two people and watched both of them be polite.
So I have no proof of anything and I know it.
What I have is a map I have carried down there three times, and a count I have done in 1995 and 2018 and this year, and the count changed.
And the thing I keep coming back to is not the house.
It is that in 2018 I walked past that plot and I did not see it, and I was looking at the ground with a map in my hand, and I would have sworn on anything that there was nothing there.
Which means either I missed it.
Or the reservoir has not finished giving things back.