Keeping a Weather Eye

 

The UK loves weather. Without the vagaries of our climate many bus-stop conversations would never start, the ferries would ALWAYS leave port, and trains would never be delayed. Basically without a good blizzard or storm putting snow or leaves on the line we’d have nothing to complain about.

And our weather shapes our landscapes as much as it shapes our conversations. Recent floods across the UK have been a timely reminder that weather is its own master, and marches to its own tune – usually an incessant thrum of rain, or banshee howl of gale. Trees that have stood firm for hundreds of years, watching history grow around them, have been felled by hurricane blasts, reminders for us, as if we needed any, that time runs out eventually for even the most oaken amongst us.

 

 

I have to confess to loving weather. I like its variety, its unpredictability and perversity, the unbridled madness it can unleash.

When I was in my early teens up I walked up the bank of our local river which was in spate. The swimming hole deep in a rocky gorge we children played in during the summer months was gone, replaced by a standing wave of epic proportions, through which whole trees sailed to be cast onto the road ahead where the river did a u-turn but the force of floodwater drove the debris straight ahead. Feet of rain had fallen in a matter of days and the run-off from the mountains around the town was causing all sorts of problems. Higher in the glen, in a field I was very familiar with from working the sheep as assistant to the local shepherd, there was a knoll, a large round 5 foot high bulge of landscape, right in the middle of the field. The only problem was that this feature wasn’t normally present.

I kicked it, and it wobbled like some gigantic jelly, the turf swaying to and fro. I realized that this was a gigantic water blister, a consequence of the copious quantities of rain deluging us, The water had built up under the mat of soil and found the weakest areas and as the pressure increased the ground had swollen, separating turf from rock beneath. I took my knife and cut a hole in the side and a jet of water shot out several feet sideways. I realized then that weather could do strange and unexpected things.

 

 

My home town of Fort William has the dubious distinction of having possibly the highest annual rainfall of any place in the UK, in the region of 80 inches in a typical year, a consequence of being situated directly below the highest mountain in the country, and on the west side of it as well, perfectly placed to catch the deluges unleashed by the prevailing moisture-laden westerly weather systems that roll in from the Atlantic. I can recall one ‘summer’ when it started raining in July and we didn’t have one period of 24 hours that it didn’t rain, for over 100 days. My mate a few miles down the road in Glenfinnan (a small hamlet surrounded by mountains) claimed to have accumulated 200 inches in his rain gauge that year.

 

 

One autumn a massive storm hit our coast and I decided to take a Social Work client I was working with out to ‘enjoy’ it. Willie was astonished, although with severe short-sightedness and tunnel vision his visual experience was limited, but the battering we took from the wind made up for it. However the most impressive aspect for both of us was the boulder noise. Each massive wave thundering ashore dislodged tons of rocks as it crashed below us. The deep bass rumble of boulder against boulder vibrating in our chest cavities, combined with the faint sulphurous whiff was a heady and unforgettable mix. Willlie was so overcome by it he whooped and cheered. It was like nothing he’d ever experienced before. This was a beach I’d occasionally swam off in the summer months, marveling at the beautifully smooth and rounded boulders, but seeing how they achieved such smooth perfection was sobering. In some places on the west coast large wave-rounded boulders weighing maybe half-a-ton can be found on clifftops some 60 feet from the sea’s surface, testament to the enormous power of big Atlantic waves.

 

 

On another occasion on the same stretch of coast my mate Paul was almost choked by an unexpected gale that flattened his tent, a severe gust of wind barreling down on us and forcing the flexible tent pole to deform so much it compressed across his throat. He was on the verge of blacking out when I managed to pull it off him and he was able to roll out. The tent was destroyed and we had a rather sleepless night afterwards. Weather does that, reminds you that you are small, insignificant and very very fragile.

 

 

A few winters back my house, and most of the other houses around me, was covered with snow and ice, it built up on the roof and gutters, and down the walls, despite my fevered hacking at it with an ace-axe. Eventually the ice ‘grew’ up under the slates and overwhelmed the poorly sealed cavity resulting in melt-water streaming inside. Four pieces of plastic gutter fastened INSIDE the house to catch the water, directed via a j-cloth in a hole down a string into a bucket saved the day, and greatly amused the sour-faced loss-adjuster from our insurers. He was so hacked off by the disregard of some householders he’d visited who had had similar problems but had just let the inundation swamp them, relying on the insurers to pick up the tab, that he photographed my catchment system for posterity (and wrote a cheque immediately for me for the minor repairs required).

 

 

I have a lovely old book written by the Rev. Alexander Stewart: ‘Twixt Ben Nevis and Glencoe’ (Natural History, Legends and Folk-lore of the West Highlands). It is a wonderful confection of tales of wildlife and weather, and human responses to them, collected by the Rev. and published in 1885. There are several mentions of weather, but one in particular is worth retelling:

One day about a month ago we were talking to an old man, still lively and active, though upwards of fourscore years of age, he observed that for fifty years at least he had not known so “natural” a spring, so seasonable a season, as he termed it, from mid-March to mid-April.

“When I was a big boy, long-legged and clumsy, (we translate his Gaelic literally), bare-headed and barefooted –  for I was twenty years of age before I had a shoe on my foot or a bonnet on my head –  I well recollect that in carting out the manure in the spring I had frequently, barefooted as I was, to jump now and again from off the top of the dung-heap; it had become so hot in the burning sun that I couldn’t bear it.  Dung heaps in those days used to reek like so many kilns, sir! Thinking of this the other day I made a barefooted son of mine stand in a manure heap that I remarked was reeking as it was being carried afield, and after a minute or two, he also found it so hot that he couldn’t bear it; and from this I conclude that this is one of the real good old springs of my younger day; for if you try in ordinary years, you will find the dung-heap at the time of its removal not hot, but at the best clammy, no warmer than a spadeful of the soil around, and oftentimes as cold, or colder, than a puddle of black peat moss. Depend upon it sir, that when manure has to be put upon the land in spring otherwise than hot and steaming, the season is not of the good old sort.”

A method this of pedometrically ascertaining the maximum and minimum of spring temperatures probably unknown to our friends in the Meteorological Society.

 

Aye, wading through it! Try that if you feel driven to explore his theory!

But for photographers, writers and painters weather is fuel, the raw material of the dramatic, and rightly so. So here’s a small selection of weather images, from all four seasons, from the mild to the wild.