LAST week’s deluge, as well as causing huge anxiety in Cumbria to those who suffered in previous floods, also revealed how vulnerable we are in Furness to being cut off completely when road and rail links are disrupted.

Disparaging references to our ‘creaking infrastructure’ and calls for more investment in existing roads and railways are made in the press.

Sooner or later, the idea of a road bridge between Barrow and Heysham rears its head again. While not intending to downplay the seriousness of flooding as an issue, maybe we should take a leaf out of our ancestors’ book and not look at all bodies of water as our enemy.

Before George Trevithick indulged in some blue-sky thinking and had the idea of putting a steam locomotive on existing rail tracks, thus paving the way for a transport revolution, people looked to rivers and the sea as the best way to carry themselves and heavy goods.

Ulverston was a port well before the canal was built, with small ships taking out iron and other local products and bringing in exotic stuff like tea and sugar.

If, instead of talking about a hugely expensive bridge, we returned to the notion of Morecambe Bay as a highway, a whole world of possibilities opens up. Someone told me he’d always liked the idea of a hovercraft service, not only between Barrow and Heysham, but from Whitehaven as well, which, on a bad day, might be faster than the road. Furness would be a lot less dependent on overloaded roads and railways if ferries from Heysham to the Isle of Man could be persuaded to call in at Barrow on both legs of their voyage. Or some entrepreneur could invest in a boat for a mixture of ferry trips and pleasure cruises. While returning to a maritime past might be seen as a nostalgic pipe dream and a backward step, it could be argued that we’re not that forward-looking when it comes to transport.

We smile at pictures of early rail carriages shaped like stagecoaches, but we are not so different, persisting with an inefficient combination of private cars, even if they are refined to driverless models, and inflexible public transport.

Perhaps we need a new Trevithick to solve the conundrum of how to move increasing numbers of people and Amazon parcels around without covering the entire country in floodable roads.