This rain

Its rained most days for over 2 months in the Hebrides, locals tell me this is the worst they can remember. I have drains in my garden and a drainage ditch, our house is built on peat as are a lot of others. The whole island is basically a bog, the good thing is even though all of our grass is saturated it does slowly drain away. Our indoor cats use sand for their litter tray, we have a peat fire, it has been very difficult this year keeping the sand and peat dry.

Same here - the rain and floods are incessant. And my OH spends his whole time looking at the weather forecast and giving me a running commentary on it. I have stopped listening - it is like the radiators humming - just background noise. What will be, will be.

Cheshire escapes a lot of rain as the worst of it tends to fall over the Welsh mountains. It also helps that I live in an area with a lot of quick draining sands and gravels.

Nothing on the scale others have here but our local park and fields surrounding are flooded so that large expanses of water are showing all the time , its not getting a chance to drain away before the next deluge. I've never seen it like this for more than a couple of days in Winter before and its now been like it for over a month and there is water running along footpaths. I'm on the fringes of Ealing .

I used to live near Yalding, it flooded most years and I got used to it, we bought a high 4-wheel drive to cope. My daughter moved back to Kent, to Maidstone, her house flooded a couple of weeks ago and she has just had a new front door with extra strong seals installed and new fencing around her garden, as it all came down. The rainfall isn't high in Kent, it's the solid clay that is the problem I think, all the water just washes over it. I lived in various parts of it for 45 years and flooding was a problem in most areas, unless you lived high up on the Downs. I lived in Chainhurst for a while and we were marooned for a week one new year, all roads were impassable.

A farmer friend told me that the problem is people filling in their drainage ditches to gain more garden/field space. All you need is one person in the chain filling in the ditches, or not bothering to clear them, and everyone gets flooded. I have watched the same thing happening here in Suffolk, we live at the edge of a watermeadow. A neighbour's garden is edged by a ditch and he has spent years disposing of his horse bedding into it, much to my horror. The estate owners adjoining us have spent the past week digging out the ditches and dumping it all right back on his land. I was very relieved.

We had a trip out for lunch into the West Sussex South Downs National Park yesterday and everything is sodden and dripping. The lanes and roads are filthy and full of puddles, the verges are muddy and very wet and the fields are simply oozing and leaking water like an overfull sponge. Will it ever dry out?

Having said that there are catkins everywhere and bulbs standing proudly showing their buds and the light has changed and is much clearer and brighter. Spring is lurking but I wish it would get a move on!

I am visiting daughter in West Sussex where it has been pouring with rain all morning. rang husband in Devon only to discover they have a lovely day down there;it's usually the other way round!!

Where DS lives in county Durham the water is running down the main road all the time. Where water drains off the fields the drains can't cope. Bitterly cold and damp here today, the kind of weather that makes your bones ache.

We can tell how bad the floods are around us without having to get out of bed. If there is a lot of traffic going past our house first thing in the morning it usually means that most roads out of the our bit of the Soar Valley are impassable. Our road only has localised flooding caused by run-off from the fields.

I feel so sorry for people who are suffering from flooding. Not only have they that to contend with but, presumably, their houses will be greatly devalued should they try to sell them.

I've told the story before about trying to get house insurance only to be told that we are too close to the river and therefore liable to flood. Although, as the crow-flies, we are fairly close, the river is in a valley and we are at one of the higher points of the village. Despite my arguing the point the girl on the phone was adamant. In frustration, I said that if our house flooded then Noah would have to set about building his ark again. After a moment's silence the girl asked 'Who?'

Same here. Although my house is new'ish it was built in the older part of the village where they knew the best pace to build [hope I'm not tempting fate saying this]. Even when one of the lanes down the road floods, the actual farmhouse doesn't because, again, it was built in the right place. Past generations knew what they were doing. If an old house does flood it's often because someone somewhere has tampered with something [we now get all the flood water from Burton since they built their flood defences a few years ago]. I must check my insurance cover though .

According to the Environment Agency the furthest edge of the ground water flooding area lies just the other side of our access road, about 40 foot from our front door. The road the other side of the ditch of the access road is in the flood zone. However the ground rises gently and we are about 18 inches above the ground water flooding and 2 or 3 feet above the road.

Some of the newer parts of the village are very firmly in the flood plain and in the 2007 summer freak inundation that nearly did for Tewkesbury 50 or 60 houses in our village were flooded. We didn't flood, we are in an old house in the old centre of the village like Tegan

Our part of the Vale of White Horse is an active flood plain and most of the fields around the village are not flooded, but contain huge puddles a hundred feet or more long and tens of feet wide, as does the village green. Some of them have been there for since before Christmas and are getting bigger.

We are on the Cambridgeshire Fens which is below sea level but efficiently drained. I have never seen the fields so waterlogged and the farm road is full of really deep potholes. Thank goodness for a 4x4 and the fact that the road is not our responsibility.

The excess for flooding on our insurance is £1000 because our postcode shows that we are between two rivers. They won't believe that our land has never flooded, not even in 1947 and 1953.

We have been told that we have to stay with our current insurer because no other company will give us flood cover. Like you merlot our house has never flooded, but that line on the map is just too close to the house. I gather we have to be 100+ feet or metres away to break free of that problem.

Mind you my sister was refused flood cover because she was within 30 yards or similar of a river. She pointed out that the river ran in a steep valley and her house was over 30 feet above it and did in the end get an insurance company to see sense

All you poor souls with flood insurance problems, do the insurance companies calculate your flood risk by how near horizontally, you are to a river or do they take the height you are as well into consideration? I am just interested in this. It seems very arbitrary.

It really sounds absolutely horrendous for you all. Our bit of Norfolk has got off comparatively lightly compared with the rest of the country. I think it's nearly all dropped by the time it gets here. We're just a bit soggy although the flood plains are all under water, it's no worse than a normal winter.

The Environment Agency had quite a good section on whether a particular address is liable to flood. We used to to prove that we were ok.

Still raining in East Sussex and the forecast is rain until Sunday.

The Environmet Agency has - after a lot of jumping up and down by local folk - spent a goodly amount on dredging, embankments and dykes in Norfolk. Hopefully they'll realise this has been beneficial, despite their claims to the contrary, and get their act together in other areas.

We are ok here but very soggy; however our local news is west country so all about the Somerset Levels and the poor people there. DH has complained for years about the failure to dredge the rivers, he says since the big ships don't go up to Gloucester docks any more they don' t dredge the Severn, nor do they clear out the drains on a regular basis. we can't help the weather but change of policy and sheer incompetence of the Environment Agency over many years has contributed to the problems. Even last year's hot summer did not do much to dry out the land. Money is found for overseas disasters (and I am not criticising that) but equal amounts should be found for disasters at home.

Nfk. There was an interesting article in one of the papers yesterday commenting on the lack of huge floods in the Norfolk Broads and saying it was because the authority that manages the Broads fought tooth and nail to keep its independence when the Environment Agency was formed and kept their independence.

The authority that used to manage the Somerset Levels must wish that they had been as successful.

Like you FlicketyB I live in the Vale of White Horse, close to the River Ock, which causes the flooding problem locally when it overflows into the Thames. A few years ago (2007?) when there was flooding, my house narrowly escaped because I live on a slight incline, so the bottom of the street was flooded, but my end wasn't. However, I still have to pay a higher Insurance Premium as I'm classed as being at flood risk, although the house has never flooded (yet). I do get worried that if it does come to creeping up this high I won't be able to do much in the way of protecting the house as I can no longer lift up one of them blooming sandbags - let alone get any (as I haven't got transport)

Goose it is amazing what a difference a slight incline makes. York had exceptional floods in 2000 and DS had a house close to the river but protected by flood defences, but not protected from ground water flooding. He thought his road was dead flat and was really worried as he had had the army in his road twice delivering sand bags, then more sandbags. The bottom of the road flooded but it obviously rose gentle along its length because his end was unaffected.

We went into Abingdon in 2007 to see the floods and the Ock pouring into the Thames. It was a spectacular sight. If floods threaten again the local authority usually make sure older people and the disabled get their sandbags delivered and put in place.

Yes, I think a lot of people imagine water flowing into the house but often it just rises up via the drains, which is foul water, not just rainwater.

There has been some 17cm (6") of rain this month in The South East with Kent badly affected. Yalding is on the point of flooding again.