It was summer 2000.

My husband was away and the children had friends round.

The rain started at about 1.30, and was the sort of rain that 'stoats' off the ground by about 3 feet.

Normally that kind of rain last a few minutes , maybe half an hour, but this rain didn't stop.

On top of that the ground had been dry for at least a month.

After about an hour of this torrential rain, whilst in the back kitchen I suddenly saw water begin to build up at the back door , which was glass, one two and then three feet deep, and then it came through the cat flap like a firehose.

I ran to the extension and the water was flowing just under the window, like a torrent and I could see it flowing along the road the same.

Looking out I could see torrents of water around my elderly demented ,mother's house , and flowing around our neighbours’ house.

Thankfully the water never went in to them; the hill in front of mum's was washed away however.

I felt that since my house had been there for all that time the safest place was upstairs in the old part of the building, and after several hours the rain stopped.

I managed to phone the firebrigade, who came but couldn't get along the road as bits were under fast flowing water and had been washed away.

Eventually they lifted the kids to safety.

I have this memory of seeing the waters as brown, as all the earth had been washed down, and we lost all our shoes.

What had happened was that the rain had loosened the layers of peat on shale on peat, and the water had sheared off the peat into the burn, which blocked under the road .

The burn, which under the torrent that day went from a trickle to about 20 metres wide.

It came along the road and around the back of the house and in.

This was in August and we were eventually out until almost Christmas.

And we lost nearly everything small to the mud.

Nothing was the same.

The insurance returned our whitegoods still dirty and full of mud.

The house took weeks to dry, and the floors all needed replacing, and I have never felt the same.

I was amazed that this could happen up a hill.

This was at the start of this kind of weather, and there have been several more landslides here under similar conditions since.

The whole experience was terrifying.

I was sure it was going to be like Aberfan, and the house would be buried under peat and shale.

My daughter never got over rain.

She was five and was screaming while it rained that it would flood, and it did.

She screamed every time it rained after that.