Floss

Floss,River at St. Ogg's near which Mr. Tulliver's mill is situated. " A wide plain, where the broadening Floss hurries on
between its green banks to the sea, and the loving tide, rushing to meet it, checks its passage with an impetuous embrace. On this mighty tide the black ships--laden with the fresh-scented fir planks, with rounded sacks of oil-bearing seed, or with the dark glitter of coal-are borne along to the town of St. Ogg's, which shows its aged, fluted red roofs and the broad gables of its wharves between the low wooded hill and the river brink, tinging the water with a soft purple hue under the transient glance of this February sun... Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss." As children Tom and Maggie Tulliver play along the Ripple and Floss, and later Maggie, Lucy Deane, and Stephen Guest go boatmg on it. The trading ships that carry Tom's venture
in Laceham goods sail down the Floss, and when Stephen Guest and Maggie go away together they are rowing on the river. When the great flood in September endangers the mill, Maggie rescues Tom in her rowboat, and it is in the swollen Floss that the two are drowned. The original of the Floss is the River Trent, on which the town of Gainsborough (the original of "St. Ogg's") is situated. The Trent is particularly liable to flooding in that region, and various destructive floods of the kind described in the catastrophe of "Mill on the Floss" have occurred in the neighbourhood of Gainsborough. The worst of these was the flood of 1770, referred to in the strory as having taken place 60 years before that in which Tom and Maggie perish.

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