Changelog

This site began life on a commercial page template, and a few bits of that costume were still showing. They're gone now.

The footer's social-media icons linked to accounts that don't exist, and its Contact, Terms and Privacy links went nowhere at all — for a site that asks you to trust how it handles your reports, that wasn't good enough. There's now a real privacy & terms page that says plainly what we store (your reports and suggestions), what never leaves your device (your starred paths and your location), and what we don't do (no accounts, no advertising, no tracking cookies). Contact now reaches a real address: hello@floodpath.co.uk.

We also cleared out the template's leftover stock photos and third-party logos that were still quietly being served from this domain, pointed the footer's "report a path" link at the actual suggest a path flow, and corrected the about page to credit both of the agencies whose gauges power the site — the Environment Agency in England and Natural Resources Wales in Wales.

One wording fix in the same spirit: a path in good shape now reads "currently passable" rather than "open and passable". River gauges tell us about water, not about locked gates or closures — we won't claim knowledge we don't have.

When we anchored flood lines to gauge history on Tuesday, Wales got left behind: Natural Resources Wales gauges don't publish the long-term statistics the Environment Agency does, so all nineteen Welsh flood lines stayed pinned to a few weeks of June readings — centimetres above quiet summer flow, primed to cry wolf at the first proper autumn rise on the Taff, Usk or Wye.

NRW does serve the readings themselves, though — a full year of them, measured every 15 minutes. So now we fetch that year and work out the same statistics ourselves: the warning line sits at the level the river only topped about 18 days in the past year, and the flood line a third of the way up to the year's peak. It's exactly the formula English gauges use, computed from the same river the path sits beside.

What that did to the lines, concretely:

• Monmouth's Wye riverside: warning line 1.12 m → 3.47 m (the Wye at Monmouth routinely runs over 2 m in an ordinary winter without the path caring)
• Abergavenny Castle Meadows on the Usk: 1.01 m → 2.31 m
• Pontypridd's Taff Trail: 0.93 m → 1.43 m
• All nineteen Welsh gauge thresholds re-anchored; every Welsh path page now says its flood line starts from the gauge's measured history

The honest details, as ever:

• A year is less history than the EA's five, so these anchors are first guesses with the same modest confidence as the English ones — reports from the ground still outrank them and tune each path's line directly
• We refuse to anchor when the year is too thin to contain a real winter (long outages, or a series that doesn't span the seasons) — those gauges keep the cautious estimate and the path page says so
• A single glitched sensor reading can't distort the line: the "year's peak" ignores lone spikes, since a real flood lasts hours, not one reading
• We also unlinked a backup gauge in Pontypridd that hadn't produced a reading in over a year — it could never have served as a fallback

Nothing changes about how reports work. If you're on the Taff Trail in wellies this winter, thirty seconds of "still passable" or "flooded" makes your path's line sharper than any statistic can.

Until today we tracked eight paths, all around Oxford. Now we cover 56, from Cricklade to Carmarthen.

• England: the Severn's flooding hotspots (Worcester, Shrewsbury, Bewdley, Ironbridge, Tewkesbury, Gloucester), the Thames from North Meadow to Hurst Park, York's riverside walks, the Calder Valley, the Trent, the Cam and Great Ouse, the Bristol Avon, the South West, and flood-prone canal towpaths from the Kennet & Avon to the Weaver
• Wales, live for the first time: the Taff Trail at Pontypridd and Cardiff, Brecon Promenade, Carmarthen Quay, The Groe at Builth Wells, Castle Meadows at Abergavenny and the Wye at Monmouth — powered by Natural Resources Wales river gauges, joining the Environment Agency network we already read
• Every path earned its place: documented flooding history (council closure notices, flood-warning areas, local news), a named route people actually use, and a verified river gauge nearby on the right river — we dropped more than twenty candidates that couldn't meet that bar
• Several paths link to the exact gauge their authorities watch: Shrewsbury's towpath reads the Welsh Bridge gauge the council uses to close it, and Brecon's gauge stands on the promenade itself

New paths start with cautious estimates and sharpen as you report — if you walk one of these and the status looks wrong, hit "Been down today?" and tell us. That's how the thresholds learn.

Every path's flood line — the river level where we flag it as flooding — has to start somewhere before anyone's reported from the ground. Until now that starting guess came from the last few weeks of gauge readings. Seeded in a dry June, those lines sat a few centimetres above normal summer flow: two paths were showing partly flooded this week on rivers behaving completely normally, and come the first ordinary autumn rise, most of the rest would have cried wolf too.

Now the starting estimate is anchored to each gauge's published long-term record — the top of its typical range (the level the river only tops a few days a year, from roughly five years of data) and its highest level on record. On the Severn at Bewdley, for example, the warning line moved from 0.70 m (June-calm plus a whisker) to 3.30 m (where the river genuinely leaves its usual range).

The honest details, as ever:

• 95 of 128 gauge thresholds were re-anchored. The rest keep the old recent-readings estimate because their gauge doesn't publish a usable long-term record — each path page says plainly which kind of estimate it has
• Community reports still outrank everything: a flood line tuned by your reports is never touched by this, and one-sided evidence ("still passable at 1.79 m") still pushes the line clear of levels people have actually walked
• A sanity check rejects gauge records that don't match what the gauge actually reports (it happens — one York gauge publishes a "typical high" above its all-time record), falling back to the cautious estimate instead

Nothing changes about how reports work — every flooded-or-passable report from the ground keeps tuning the line for its own path. This just makes the starting point honest about winter, not calibrated to a quiet June.

River gauges occasionally stop reporting — maintenance, telemetry faults, the usual. Until now that meant the path it watched showed No recent data until the gauge came back, even when another live gauge sat a few hundred metres away.

Every path now has up to two backup gauges linked alongside its usual one, nearest first. If the usual gauge goes quiet for more than a day, the status switches to the nearest live backup automatically — and switches straight back when the usual gauge returns.

Full transparency, as always:

• The path page tells you it's a backup, which gauge it is, how far away it sits, and when the usual gauge last reported.
• Levels at different gauges sit on different scales, so each backup gets its own flood line, learned separately from your reports. A report you send while a backup is active calibrates that gauge — nothing gets mixed up.

This took Osney Thames Path straight from No recent data back to a live status: its usual gauge has been silent since 8 June, but the downstream gauge at the same lock is alive and well, 180 m from the path.

Until today, the paths we track were the ones we picked. Now you can add yours.

• Hit Suggest a path in the menu (or the button on the paths page) and you'll get a map of Great Britain — zoom in to your path and tap along it to trace the stretch that floods
• Tell us in your own words how it floods — where the water sits, how often, how deep. That description is exactly what the reviewer reads, so landmarks help ("calf-deep by the footbridge" beats "gets wet")
• Suggest a name if you like, or leave it to us
• Searched for a path and found nothing? The search now offers to turn that search straight into a suggestion

Every suggestion gets reviewed before going live: we check the route against the river, make sure there's a level gauge near enough to read, and settle on a name. Once it's in, it works like every other path — live river readings, a starting flood estimate, and your reports tuning it from day one.

No account needed, as ever. An email is optional and only used if we have a question about your path.

Two improvements to how much you can trust what you see:

• Fresher data, automatically. If our stored river levels are more than two hours old when you load a page, we now top them up from the Environment Agency on the spot. Previously a scheduling quirk meant levels could be a day old by the evening commute — that's gone.
• "No recent data" instead of a guess. River gauges occasionally go quiet. When the latest reading is more than a day old we now say No recent data and show you the last reading and when it was taken, rather than presenting an old verdict as current. The same applies anywhere we simply don't have a reading — we'll never invent a status.

Each path's flood line is tuned by your reports — and from today, not every report counts the same.

• Recent reports carry more weight than old ones. Paths change — drainage gets fixed, banks erode — so if a report from this morning disagrees with one from two winters ago, this morning wins
• Old reports fade gradually (half their weight after about six months) but never vanish entirely: on a path nobody has reported in a while, an old report is still the best evidence there is
• A report sent while an official Environment Agency flood warning was in force counts extra — the warning independently backs up what you saw
• The confidence we show is earned from that weighted evidence, so it honestly drifts down as the reports behind it age, instead of staying frozen at a number from last winter

Same deal as always: no accounts, no tracking — just river readings and your reports, kept honest.

Our river readings tell you how high the water is. But when the Environment Agency itself has a Flood Alert or Flood Warning in force for your area, that's the most authoritative word there is — so now we lead with it.

When there's an active EA warning near a path, the path page shows it up top:

• The level — Flood Alert, Flood Warning or Severe Flood Warning — in the Agency's own plain wording, with when it was issued
• A direct link to the official EA page for that area, so you can check it at source — we're not asking you to take our word for it
• It sits above our own estimate, because an official warning outranks a gauge reading every time

And it works both ways: if you report a path as flooded while an EA warning is in force, we note that your report lines up with the official picture — an extra bit of confidence behind what people on the ground are telling each other.

Warnings come straight from the Environment Agency under the Open Government Licence and refresh through the day.

The whole point is a fast check before you head out, so we've moved the two most useful facts up onto the cards — on your saved paths and the full list — where you see them without tapping through:

• Which way it's heading — a quiet ↑ Rising or ↓ Falling cue right on the card, so a flooded-but-falling path reads differently from one that's still climbing
• How fresh it is — a plain "Updated 2 h ago" so you know how much to trust the status at a glance
• We only show the arrow when the river is actually moving, and we built it so the whole grid still loads in a single trip to the database — no extra waiting

Same readings we already pull every two hours; nothing new to set up.

The level right now is only half the story. A path sitting at its flood line and falling is a very different shout from one rising fast — wellies-and-go versus leave-it-today.

Every path page now shows the recent direction of its river, in plain terms:

• Rising, falling or holding steady, with the actual change — e.g. "up 4 cm over the last 6 h" — so you can judge it yourself
• Worked out from the readings we've already been logging every two hours, so there's nothing new to wait for
• We only show a direction when there's enough recent data to mean something — no reading tea-leaves

Until now, the line between "passable" and "flooded" was a starting guess based on recent river levels. From today, your reports move that line.

• When you report a path, we line up the river level at that moment against what you saw on the ground — flooded, passable, or passable-in-wellies
• Enough of those and the path's flood line shifts to where it really floods, instead of where we first guessed
• The "wellies" reports are doing real work: they mark the in-between level where a path turns boggy but is still rideable, not just the point it goes fully under
• Each path page now says plainly whether its flood line is still a starting estimate or has been tuned by people who've been down

No accounts, no tracking — just the river readings and your reports, kept honest.

A river gauge a mile away only tells you so much. Now every path has a quick Been down today? report, right on its page — no account, no fuss.

• Tap Passable or Flooded, add how you crossed (on foot, by bike, in wellies) and an optional note
• Your report shows up straight away for the next person checking the path
• We record the river level at the moment you report, so over time the reports teach us the level where this path really floods
• Each page now shows the live river reading it's based on, in plain terms

See how readings and reports fit together

Path statuses now reflect live river-level readings from the Environment Agency rather than a static seed value. We match each path to its nearest gauging station and refresh every couple of hours.

• Statuses update automatically — no manual editing needed
• Each path page regenerates on a schedule so it stays current
• See how statuses work

The new path checker lets you search by name, place or waterway and see at a glance whether a route is passable, partly flooded or flooded — no account, no fuss.

• Search across every path on the map
• Clear status badges on every path page
• Browse all paths

Flood Path is live. It's a simple, free way to check whether a local cycle path, towpath or footpath is under water before you head out — starting with the routes people around Oxford check most.

Got a path that floods? Tell us about it and we'll add it to the map.