A Week on the Estate: Storm Babet, Wet Week & Clint’s News
Storm Babet dominated the weather and the news this week. The Environment Agency declared a major incident after more than a month’s rain fell on Lincolnshire over 24 hours last weekend. Residents and businesses across the county experienced flooding, and midweek brought more rain to saturated ground to hamper the clean-up.
A difficult October with yo-yoing temperatures and more rain than the landscape could absorb followed the UK’s joint-warmest September since 1884. Globally, September 2023 was the warmest on record by a significant margin, beating the 1991-2020 average by 0.93C. According to the BBC Climate & Science Team, ongoing greenhouse gas emissions coupled with the latest El Niño cycle could make extraordinary weather all too ordinary.
Babet made plenty of mischief around South Ormsby Estate, lapping at the Hall’s front door, briefly creating a moat around the Walled Garden, flooding the building site at Harden’s Gap and testing the patience of grazing Lincoln Reds.
We’ll have a bit of clearing up to do but it could have been worse. Frequent wonky weather has shown us the value of keeping on top of drainage and irrigation and embracing regenerative farming principles. A vibrant and coherent soil biome, teeming with viral, bacterial and insect species, is indispensable if the soil is to support plant and animal life season after season while soaking up heavy rain during wet winters and resisting wind erosion during dry summers.
For the full story of a thoroughly wet week on the Estate, we caught up with Hall Steward Clint Coughlan. “We measured 80mm of rainfall in the Walled Garden last Friday,” said Clint. “I was out in it and was soaked to the skin. There’s a little bridge between the courtyard and the Walled Garden and one side of it floated up and raised itself like Tower Bridge. What is usually a babbling brook turned into a raging torrent. I kept clearing the drains of leaves to let the water flow away and stop the courtyard from flooding.