KEY POINTS:
Tewkesbury owes its existence to its location on the confluence of the rivers Avon and Severn which meet on the meadows below its Norman abbey.
A crossroads of trade and a gateway to the western kingdom, it was here that the armies of York and Lancaster clashed in
one of the decisive battles of the War of the Roses.
Reminders of this history lie all around this market town, a celebrated stop on the Cotswold cream-tea tourist trail, where coach loads of visitors admire its Tudor architecture and narrow alleyways. In one of the abbey's inaccessible burial vaults can be found the bones of George Clarence, dispatched according to Shakespeare - with the dramatist's regard for the historical record - in a butt of malmsey.
Elsewhere in the crypts lie the bones of the foot soldiers who met their death either in the Bloody Meadow or in the sacred environs of the abbey itself when Edward's IV's Yorkists defied the medieval rules of sanctuary to slaughter their Lancastrian quarry in cold blood.
The talk yesterday was that the bones of both royal houses were now mingling in the catacombs of the abbey for the first time in centuries. But even for locals with a keen appreciation of the long sweep of history afforded by this corner of Gloucestershire, the events of recent days have proved testing in the extreme.
The rain began falling at 3am on Friday, said Berengeria FitzHamond-Davis, who lives in the abbey's 700-year-old converted grain store on the banks of the Severn. By daybreak, the water was up to her knees. Yesterday, however, she was refusing to be cowed by the devastation the flood had wrought on her home.
Dressed in a pink bonnet and silver high-heels she was showing passers-by the damage.
"If you live in a place like Tewkesbury you know you are going to get flooded at some point. But it hasn't happened like this for 150 years," she said.
Her initial reaction was to move her seven cats to the safety upstairs, followed by her collection of 16th and 17th century oil paintings. Most had been saved but wading through the filthy brown water in the candlelight yesterday she was still able to point out antique furniture and books lost to the flood.
Tewkesbury was little more than an island in the English countryside where the cars bobbed in the flooded streets and where ruined possessions began stacking up outside people's front doors. Approach roads into the town were impassable to anything but boats while those with rubber boots were forced to brave the quagmire of the disused railway track - the only land link with the outside world.
The town, with its population of 10,000, has been the worst hit by the weekend's floods.
Fresh water supplies are non-existent with the local Tesco handing out thousands of bottles of drinking water to locals.
Electricity supplies are touch and go with fears that the still rising water levels might yet engulf a nearby sub-station plunging Tewkesbury and the rest of Gloucestershire into darkness.
- INDEPENDENT
