After the flood

There are few more charming grounds than Edenside, home of Carlisle CC. The river curls past two sides of the ground, a steep banking on one side gives the ground intimacy and a sense of history is provided by a 19th-century pavilion. This is a satisfying place to play and watch cricket.

But Carlisle, like many English grounds, is built on a flood plain and a few weeks before Christmas the peace was shattered. Edenside has been flooded before but never like this. Storm Desmond savaged the north of England with Cumbria and Yorkshire worst affected. Honister, in the Lake District, had 34cm of rain in 24 hours. Carlisle took the brunt with hundreds made homeless.

Somewhere at the bottom of the Eden are the remnants of a letter from Mike Gatting, who came up to Edenside with Middlesex to face Cumberland in the first round of the NatWest Trophy 20 years ago. Gatting, who had played his last Test for England the previous year, made 71 to guide Middlesex through a tricky game and then wrote a note to congratulate Carlisle on the finest teas in the country.

"We have lost so many old pictures from the past," Mark McAlindon, chairman of the selection committee, says. "We moved the pictures upstairs into the changing room thinking that would be high enough but it wasn't. The water came up just below the pavilion clock. It was hip high in dressing room."

They cherished Gatt's note at Carlisle CC, chuckling over his trencherman's appetite, but then they also cherished much of the other stuff that has so far been loaded on to five 40-yard skips. On the bar in the pavilion, still bare less than a month before the start of the season as electric drills screech and paint pots are opened, are a collection of old photographs, water damaged but just about salvageable.

This scene is being enacted all over the north. The ECB's response has been swift and admirable: community commitment writ large. An emergency flood relief scheme was initially primed with £500,000, then doubled once the scale of devastation became clear. Dan Musson, the ECB's facilities and investment manager, put on his wellingtons and witnessed the scale of the damage. After a site inspection, money was in bank accounts within a month. So many cricket grounds are built on flood plains. If the climate is changing, the future is a worrying one.

More than 54 clubs registered for help - the majority in Cumbria, Yorkshire and Lancashire but with others affected in Northumberland, Wales, Worcestershire and Devon - as Storm Eva added to the devastation caused by Storm Desmond. Two children's names unlikely to be shortlisted by many cricket-loving parents in the years ahead.

"It's absolutely fantastic the way that the cricket family has pulled together," Musson says. "From a club level the number of volunteers who've been working incredibly hard to try and save elements of their cricket ground, while their own homes might be significantly affected by flooding, is just remarkable."

At Edenside, the chairman Mike Rayson, a local newsagent who has done much to re-energise the club, was about to throw his water-wrecked bat into the skip, consoling himself that not for the first time it was a confirmation of retirement. Heartened, too, that the club has been galvanised by its predicament.

He got the first call about the flood around 6.30pm one evening. "Three months from the day that Cumberland won the Minor Counties Championship final here, I got the phone call to say that Carlisle would be flooded," he says. "We had about 15 people down at 10.30 on a Friday night and moved all our equipment upstairs. We got as much out of the club as possible.

"On Saturday morning the river was about two foot away from the top of the riverbank and I got a call at 6pm that evening to say the club was about six feet under. It was about 16 foot deep at its peak. From then it has been a slog - a slog to get rid of all the stuff, to order things, to get workmen in, to get them in at the right time, to get jobs signed off.

"The ECB has been very generous. The community has been very good and we had people who came down from Sellafield for a day. The club members have rallied. Every week we have had a dozen and more.

"A month before the season there is still a lot of work to do on the square. To be honest, we haven't really started that. There is still tons of work - there is still plasterboard of the walls, there is still the full club to repaint, the bowels of the club needs a good gutting out. There is still two months' work to do but we only have a month to do it."

Marc Brown, the 1st XI captain, agreed to rejoin the club just before the flood hit. "I've come from Netherfield - the best batting square in the league," he says. "I'll have to work hard for my runs this season. Low and slow, because of the river, and I expect it will definitely be low and slow this year."

This was Carlisle's third flood in ten years. Carlisle stands on the confluence of three rivers: the Eden, Caldew and Petteril. The Caldew joins the Eden at the back of the ground. They were granted £20,000 by the ECB; half of that went on the insurance excess. There followed £5000 from Sport England, another £1400 from Cumbrian Cricket and £9000 from Cumbria Community Association to re-equip a thriving junior section. It is money easily spent, even by the most cash-conscious club.

If the flood was bad, the looting was far worse. The first time they smashed up the one-arm bandit. They returned to steal most of the spirits, which had been stored away upstairs. Then they came back to smash up the pool table. There have been a lot of prosecutions in Carlisle. The flood waters had receded to reveal some grungy minds.

"We knew the flood was coming," Rayson reflects. "There was nothing we could do. You have to live with it. The looting was hard to stomach."

Storm Desmond struck as Carlisle CC were drawing up proposals to re-site the pavilion furthest from the river, where the water could be expected only to lap in at ankle height. They are awaiting a decision on funding and aspire to running an indoor centre of excellence as well (the finest in the north), which, if successful, would be a powerful restatement of their determination to prosper. Their successful junior sides are testimony to the club's vigour. "The old pavilion would make a lovely riverside café," Rayson muses.

Only now are thoughts turning to the season, which begins a little later this far north. The groundsman, David Reed, now well into his 70s, was born in Fletchertown, 12 miles away, and is Cumbrian to the core. He can't put a date on when he became groundsman. "There wasn't really a set time. They just sort of threw it at me when I was a player." But he can remember the dates of the floods: "2005… 2009… 2015".

"It is just repetitive," he says. "It leaves a big mess and you clean the mess up and that. But I never think I've had enough. I've never wanted to walk away from Carlisle CC. You just have to get up and get on with it.

"Nature has changed. It used to flood but there was only a trickle and there wasn't even a flood bank then. It would put little pockets of silt on the field and it would do good: we were quite happy with a slight covering.

"A lot of clubs would like this setting. I come down here because I want to come down."

He faces a challenging task to get the square ready for the opening league fixture against Millom on April 30. As he contemplated the work ahead, an icy squall battered his face. It was 5C, approaching lunchtime, with snow on the Lake District peaks a few miles to the south.

"We'll be ready for the first game. It only takes a week of good weather to get it ready."