TWO hundred years ago today the Black Flood poured through Marsden at 1am after Swillers Reservoir burst, inundated the valley and swept five people to their deaths.

Last week I appealed for information about the tragedy and reader Stella Ainley from Cowcliffe sent me the relevant extracts from the book Bygone Marsden by Lewis Buckley Whitehead.

Her father was Wilfred Doyle, the reser voir keeper for the Wessenden Valley.

“When I was a girl, I lived in the reservoir keeper’s house, Glenholme, at the bottom of Butterley Bank,’’ she said. “I was well aware of the flood of 1810 and sometimes, on a stormy night in winter, when I heard the roar of the water coming over the Byewash, I wondered what would happen if the reservoir burst its bank.”

In the flood a cottage at Bank Bottom was swept away. It was the home of James Haigh who escaped because he was working in Standedge Tunnel. But the waters took his wife, two children and a niece.

Mrs Ainley believes the Haighs were an old Marsden family and their descendants were reservoir keepers at Wessenden in the years before her father.

The flood went on to devastate Horsfall’s mill where a man called Bamforth and his wife were washed out of bed.

According to the account in the book: “He made a desperate attempt to save his wife’s life, along with his own, by clinging to a wooden post while gripping on to her.

“Unfortunately his strength gave out and, in the mad rush of waters, she was carried away. Her dead body being found later in the vicinity of Longroyd Bridge.”

Even 200 years later, the stark account is enough to make you pause, reflect and, perhaps, say a prayer.