Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

Up the road from here a new city has formed for about a week. Its population is roughly twice that of the City of Bath, which is close by. It's not actually in Glastonbury but on a farm near the village of Pilton which is way closer to Shepton Mallet than Glasto.

However, the Isle of Avalon () n that is in Glastonbury and let's face it "Shepton Mallet" doesn't really cut it for a festy name! Pilton isn't too bad for a name but Glasto does have a Tor and some proper oddness. There is a bloke on the main road in Glasto at the moment, dressed up as Merlin who is blessing everyone who passes through. Nice sentiment.

Anyway, I'd like to think that somewhere in the 90 odd stages in this year's Glasto, a Mellotron is wheezing and whining somewhere! The sound they produce is so lovely. Everyone else will be using a synth of some sort, probably on a laptop but it won't ever sound quite like a Mello ... well it will because modern gear can emulate a Mello and other old stuff rather well, for me. I don't buy cables costing £lol

------ () Before the Somerset levels were drained in the C16ish, Glasto Tor was an island as were several other raised bits of villages - eg Muchelney abbey was an island too. On the levels the older buildings are built on mounds for obvious reasons. Ill advised modern housing estates get flooded.

Where I used to live, a little north of Glasgow but a little south of Stirling, there was a big flat bit of low-lying ground where a modern housing estate was built, with a nice little stream at the bottom.

The ground was flat because it was the bottom of a loch drained in the 1500s, by a culvert to a river a few miles away.

All the rubbish that people threw from their cars washed down the stream, into the wetlands that it flowed through, and eventually began to gunk up the culvert. The wetlands got bigger, the stream got deeper, and by the 1970s the housing scheme had a nice little pond instead of a stream, and cracks in every foundation.

It's not as bad as the proposed housing scheme further along the valley, where I have a photo (which I can't find just at the moment, sorry) of the developer's 4m tall sign boards just barely sticking out of a pond the size of the entire fenced-off bit.

Don't drain wetlands then build on them, folks. Geology will always win against you.

Apparently they were put up to it by a bunch of Dutch engineers. To be fair the engineering is fabulous given how old it is, provided you don't screw with rivers and allow the drainage ditches to silt up. All the farms and older buildings are on mounds.

There are loads of modern estates built on the flood plains - it is madness. I live in Yeovil, on the side of a hill, 40' above the brook at the bottom edge of our garden. Just north is Yeovil Marsh (mostly drained but the name is a clue), yes of course people build houses in a fucking marsh! The word Yeovil was originally Gifle (C7) which means bend in a river in old English. There are of course houses rather close to the river Yeo that get very damp with monotonous regularity.

Cumbernauld (guess!) looked charming back in 1986, when we drove past. It still looked lovely about four years ago, the concrete had aged beautifully.

I studied Civ Eng at Plymouth Poly back in '89 and our first field trip was to Roadford Reservoir with its smart new dam - built for something like 1 in 1000 year events. Sadly 1 in 1000 year events are more common these days due to global warming. Luckily Dartmoor is pretty stable but really big dams could be severely tested in the coming decades. Ironically one of our remedies - the EV is much heavier than the gas guzzler. That means that multi story CPs could become overloaded. However pre-stressed conc. members are bloody strong and shouldn't fail by exploding, so I shouldn't lose too much sleep!

Geology, hydrology and meteorology can be jolly unforgiving.

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