This was the scene this morning in Roberts Park, Saltaire. The Cricket Pitch is no longer a lake, with the river having returned to its normal boundaries… There’s just a great big puddle on the slightly lower ground nearer the footbridge. Much the same is true to the west of the park, on the Higher Coach Road estate…

All of the pictures in this post were taken by Eddie Lawler, who asked me if there was anything I’d particularly like pictures of. I said that, amongst all the images I’d gathered for this blog in the last couple of days, I hadn’t really seen any from Higher Coach Road… so off he went! Thanks Eddie. (I’m in Manchester and it hasn’t really been safe to travel to do my own eye-witnessing…)

The high watermark for the flood is pretty clear from the lines of light debris left behind on the banking up to the estate’s houses…

Thankfully, it looks like the water didn’t get as far as the houses, although at the far end, the houses on Bowland Avenue (physically the lowest on the estate) had a close shave…

Note the line of mole hills that appear immediately above the waterline… The moles have clearly been pushed uphill by the water! And that water keeps on coming… The river is back within its bounds, but look at the flow rate over Hirst Weir…

Note the debris in the tree here, and the snapped fence post…

Crossing the footbridge to the other side of the river, Eddie made his way back to his home in Saltaire via Salts Sports. This is the view back to the Coach Road estate from the far side… again, lots of debris in trees.

But turning around,  and looking up towards the canal, just look at what’s been left on the Salts Sports Cricket Pitch!

That’ll clearly take some time and expense to clear up, but the more serious damage for Salts Sports has been done to the harder infrastructure. I’ll let the following images speak for themselves, noting only that the first one shows concrete slabs having been lifted off the wall and then dumped by the river…

Of course, Shipley/Saltaire has got off lightly by comparison with some other places in this week’s flooding (Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd just keep suffering over and over, it seems). But for everybody’s sake let’s  just hope that the further rain forecast for the next couple of days doesn’t bring a reprise of the Christmas chaos.