We haven’t been here since December 2015 when the floods of Storm Desmond ripped through the parkland of Featherstone Castle. The South Tyne is broad at this point, wooded on one side, grazed by cattle beneath specimen trees on the other. The waters charge down from Alston during prolonged rain. We’re shocked at how radically the course has altered. Even the repairs, as recent as this April, stepped tiers of massive stone blocks, were damaged three weeks ago in a new spate. Whole trees litter a long mound of shingle. A huge crescent has been sculpted out of the bank, eating half into the tarmac road that once led to the prisoner of war camp.

Between 1945 and 1948, thousands of German officers were held here in a series of huts, compounds and sports field. Outlines of the layout are visible under the turf. Some scattered brick buildings still exist where cattle now take shelter in muddied rooms. It was a rehabilitation camp – the men could work on local farms during the day. It had a newspaper, three orchestras and a puppet theatre. We pass a memorial plaque fixed to a gate column that now has no fence or gate; it commemorates “Captain Herbert Sulzbach OBE who dedicated himself to making this camp a seed bed of British-German reconciliation”.

Cows wander past the brick remnants to trundle down through flowering gorse to the river. Jackdaws yack from trees above the castle, its crenellated walls and towers grey and solemn on this overcast day. A nuthatch calls in alarm from high up in a lime tree. A heron wings its way slowly upstream. We walk carefully, for the turf is deeply undercut by the flood, collapsed in flat green slabs on to the boulders below.

The afternoon is cutting in. Across the river, flocks of starlings gather in the darkening sky. They move in waving patterns, looping and twisting, diverging and coalescing, before erupting into starbursts like a firework display. Their winter murmuration takes place over reedbeds established to treat water from old mine workings. They swirl above our heads, wheeling and shape-shifting, until, with a sound like rushing wind, they plummet into the reeds and the air is suddenly still.