Floods of tears fail to sink butcher’s

It’s hard enough trying to keep a village shop open for business under normal circumstances these days, but for the little butcher’s shop in Burton Fleming you could say the past few months have been literally about keeping their heads above water.

Marie Wells is non-committal about the long-term future of Wells’ Butchers, which she and her farmer husband Stephen took over five years ago and reopened recently after being closed for two months following the flooding over Christmas and New Year.

“The closure, plus the work to get it back open, has been very expensive. I’d say the whole thing including paying staff, replacing the floor, bills and loss of income has cost us something like £10,000 to £15,000 in that time. That’s not something you can recoup very easily if at all.

“During the time we were closed Stephen and I talked about whether we should reopen or call it a day but the shop is important for the village. We added an off licence to it a few years ago when the Burton Arms pub was closed for a while and that is popular too. At the moment we have decided to keep it running for the village so we’ve reopened and we’ll see what happens.”

Marie’s uncle owned the butcher’s shop before she and Stephen took it over and her uncle’s family had run it going back generations for over 100 years.

“It runs off its reputation. We don’t exactly get much passing trade as we’re not on a main road. In fact, a lot of people even in Bridlington and Driffield had never heard of Burton Fleming until over Christmas and New Year when we were on the news every night. But the shop is well supported by the villagers.”

Stephen has lived in the village all his life. He and Marie live at Manor Farm where they run a mixed livestock and arable enterprise. The running of the shop came about partly through the retirement of Marie’s uncle and partly because of the way the Wells diversified.

“We have 50 suckler cows, 16,000 free range chickens and the rest is a combination of cereals and potatoes. We stock our own home-produced beef in the shop.”

But in all his time in Burton Fleming Stephen has never seen anything like the flooding they witnessed at the turn of the year.

“I’ve seen it get across the road to the pub and on to the general stores before. The thing is that it’s not like floodwater that you normally see when rivers reach their peak and there is a sudden rush. It’s groundwater that slowly builds up as the water table rises.

“This time I kept expecting it to peak, but it just kept coming up and up that’s what caught the council out by not sandbagging. The problem was that some of the flooding in people’s homes wasn’t coming in off the street, it was coming up through springs into gardens and even living rooms.”

Stephen explains that trying to mitigate against flooding when the water table is so high is a problem. It’s not all down to what is known as the Gypsy Race, the beck that flows through the Great Wold Valley that starts up in North Grimston and flows through Weaverthorpe, Helperthorpe, Foxholes, Burton Fleming, Rudston, Boynton and into Bridlington Bay.

“There is now plenty of talk about what can be done to make sure what happened doesn’t occur again. I’m on the parish council and everyone is taking it all very seriously.

“The water table has dropped by two feet since January so the risk of flooding in the near future would only happen if we had one or two weeks of incessant rain. Hopefully that won’t happen. We still have the sandbags out here along Thwing Lane, outside people’s houses and near the Burton Arms but the pumps have now been taken away. One of the things the council is looking at is the possibility of making the beck deeper.

“We’ve just experienced the wettest period on record for 100 years. The last time the village was flooded was 1979 and back then it didn’t come up like it did over Christmas. What it did show though was the community spirit that still exists in Burton Fleming today. Everyone was out helping someone to either recover from flooding or avoid it.

“Around New Year it rained for three days solid and we received a load of sandbags from the council. My cousin Keith and I went round the village dropping them off wherever people wanted them.

“There was a lot of slagging- off of the council at the time, but in fairness since they realised just how bad it was for us they have been coming on a daily basis to monitor the situation. They were a bit slow on the uptake though.

“We had a few problems with larger wagons coming down into the village and then finding they couldn’t get through because roads were closed, but overall the media helped by letting people know.”

The expense Stephen and Marie have suffered over the past few months would have seen off many other village shops, but they are hanging in there.

“Burton Fleming isn’t about to lose its butchers shop yet if we can help it,” says Marie.

RURAL BACKWATER GOES WITH FLOW

Burton Fleming has never had too much in the way of publicity. The last time the Wolds village was in the news was when the Burton Arms was in danger of being sold off and converted into an old people’s home.

The pretty community is built around a crossroads and the Gypsy Race, with small bridges leading over the race to many of the houses. It is largely untouched by commercialism with just a couple of caravan parks, despite its proximity to Bridlington and Driffield.