Boscastle at Christmas

So that afternoon (back to Christmas) we decided we would pop over and see what progress has been made in Boscastle after the terrible flood in 2004 that devastated the town a few years ago...

Not a huge amount has changed, it somehow felt like the car park was higher up (although it could have been my imagination), but there was a perfectly tangible new huge chunky wall on the river bank -

- (next to a brand spanking new toilet block) -

- flood defences have been drastically improved before the original bridge -

- (comparison shot from 2006) -

- and the channel past the bridge has been significantly widened and deepened -


- (comparison) -

- there is a brand new visitors centre -


- and a nice new bridge (which is extremely low profile) to help prevent build up, as the old one acted something like a dam when 14 floating cars got caught up under it -

- everything (largely) appears to be back to normality in the village (still one or two buildings under construction, incredibly) -

- and the odd paranoid sandbag lingers (as there was a mini repeat performance in June 2007) -

- but, as I noted before, there is simply no going back to the well matured, charmingly scruffy feel of the Boscastle of yore...a shame, especially as this was very far from the first time such an event has taken place (records date back to 1847)...it almost feels like securing the portal when the quadruped has already scarpered... :(