Mother Nature at her best

These pictures are from a few weeks ago, when I was down at the in-laws. There is a walk near by that runs along an old rail track and includes a few of the old bridges and tunnels and leads to the Costa I was relaxing in in the previous post.

It's a nice little walk away from everything or rather it was until the flooding and storms that happened over the winter! Now it's not quite so picturesque, although it still has a strange beauty to it, not to mention some pretty aweinspiring sights.

Above and below are two picture of one of the bridges that once stood on the track, the other bridge is further along and is blocked off as you have to either cross an unsafe bridge or pass through an unsafe tunnel, both of which I don't really fancy doing. Ten years ago I would have given it a second thought and I would no doubt have some pretty cool pictures to show for it, but today I'm not nearly as brave or reckless, plus I'd have to explain it all to the wife and that wouldn't be fun. Anyway, as you can see the bridge is totalled and they weren't some flimsy things either but proper Victorian heavy engineered jobs from when the railway line was first laid.

It would have taken a high amount of force to move the bridge like that and the other bridge was removed entirely from its abutment. Yes, there was a lot of debris in the water, including a couple of caravans from one of the holiday parks! And further along just out of view from where these pictures were taken there was a land slide of significant size.

These are fence posts, believe it or not. You can see about the top 6 inches on some of  them but the several feet of fence underneath has disappeared. The grey area in the picture has all been filled in with debris from the flooding and is only a small part of what can be seen.

There is also a road that runs higher up the hill, which now shows some classic signs of land slip, I really should have taken some pictures as they were amazing to see. It reminded me so much of my school days and the crappy examples they always use to show, maybe next time I'm there I'll take some pictures and send them in to my old school teachers.

You have to admire mother nature though, sure she causes all sorts of problems for us, floods, snow storms, strong winds, the list is endless but there is very little else out there with such brute force and mastery of all it touches.