There have been a number of conspiracy theories over the floods of 2014 that devastated the village of Moorland.

A reservoir near Taunton was ‘let go’ allowing a wall of water to flow down the River Tone and spill out into the village. There’s one theory that says the building of houses, warehouses and roads have displaced water meaning it flows into the rivers more quickly. Another has it that failure to dredge the rivers Tone and Parrett led to the water breaking the banks quickly and easily compared to years gone by. And there’s the one about the village being sacrificed by the authorities to save Taunton and Bridgwater from major flooding.

All have their advocates but all are impossible to prove or disprove. One line of thought that has gained traction in recent years is about modern farming practices and how they affect excess rain water to run off the land.

John Rowlands of the Environment Agency told the Mercury he felt it was the way bogs, copses, hedges and ponds had been removed from farmland up and down the course of the two rives that had added to the problem.

“I get phone calls from the farmers down on the moors,” he said, “saying ‘John there must be something wrong as the moors are getting flooded much quicker so it must be something up at Taunton.’ So I go up to Taunton and speak to the residents there and they say ‘John the water gets to us much more quickly something must be going on up stream.’ So I go up to Wellington and they say something is happening here with the water coming down too quickly. And what’s above Wellington? Nothing but fields.”

“We need to examine what is happening and development is an easy route to go down. But 96 percent of Somerset is not built on. And that is the part of what we are looking at. Slow the Flow is about that. Look at dew ponds – there were thousands years ago – now they have all been filled in.”

He said the concept of Slow the Flow was about returning areas of farmland to woodland, bog, marsh and ponds where water was naturally stored just like a few years ago. Without hedges and copses to slow down the drainage further upstream the rivers become swollen very quickly.

Has modern farming practices damaged flood prevention? Your views on such matters to harry.mottram@nqsw.co.uk