The recent announcement that a major flood relief project is envisaged by the authorites to include the longest tunnel that will take the heavy rain water from Attard via Birkirkara to Ta’ Xbiex is yet another attempt to deal with this problem that must have confounded the residents of Birkirkara since time immemorial.

Everybody is familiar with the photographs and filmed shots of the floods along Valley Road, Birkirkara, with cars swept away by the torrents and piled up under the bridge over the narrow Sqaq il-Qasab.

What is today known as Valley (or Msida) Road was in fact a wied with fields on both sides, now densely built to include the Duke of Connaught Band Club. A watercolour by David Frederick Markham (1806-1853) from the Albert Ganado Collection reproduced in Treasures of Malta No. 46 shows a stone foot bridge traversing the valley under which the water flowed so that people could cross from one side to the other. In fact this has always been known as il-Wied ta’ Birkirkara and presumably has referred not to the valley as such but to the torrential waters, as in “għaddej il-wied”.

I was recently shown a photograph (reproduced with this letter) that must have been taken over a century ago when the bridge was still in place. The owner of this picture, Paul Micallef, lived in the house at the end of the ramp at right; this building still stands. Where there is a wall is now McDonald’s. In the middle distance is St Paul’s Church. There is the horse trough of heavy stone below the ramp. The bridge was removed with the advent of the car.

There are a number of assumptions regarding how this town got its name but the one that seems to me to be the most likely is that it is a corruption of bir ċar-ċara (flowing well). How many people know that there is a large underground arched tunnel that passes under St Aloysius College that takes the water all the way to a large aqueduct in the square near St Helena’s parish church? This is accessible from a well whose opening in a private building I shrunk after the war to stop young boys from daring to go down and walk along the passageway. I presume the architects who are planning the flood relief tunnel have the plans of this.