Ruth Binney - Wise Words and Country Ways Weather Lore

It is impossible to live in Britain without being preoccupied by the weather day by day and even hour by hour. For it affects everything, from our moods to our sports and from farmers harvests to the state of our gardens. Given the position of the British Isles, set in the north-east of the Atlantic in the path of the jet stream, the weather is always going to be variable, interesting and hard to predict. In April, for instance, on the first day of the cricket season, we may be either basking in warm sunshine or wrapped in winter woollies wondering whether we are completely mad to be outdoors. We know too that the British summer can range from the proverbial two fine days and a thunderstorm to if we are very lucky week on week of hot sunny weather.

It is hardly surprising that there are hundreds of sayings relating to the weather and its forecasting. The oldest go back to records made on Babylonian tablets in the 12th century bc, including, When a cloud grows dark in the sky, a wind will blow. The Greeks and Romans also preserved many pieces of weather lore. Foremost among Greek forecasters was the physician Aratus, from whom we get an early version of Red sky in the morning complete with mythological references:

Or if Aurora tinge with glowing red

The clouds that float round Phoebus rising head,

Farmer rejoice! For soon refreshing rains

Will fill the pools and quench the thirsty plains.

The first weather saying to make an indelible impression on me as a child was the one that my father would come out with every year on 22 December, the day after the winter solstice. He would look up from his breakfast newspaper and pronounce: As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens. Indeed it does, and another of his favourites, Ring round the moon, snow soon, also contains more than a grain of truth. Since childhood I have delighted in and collected such sayings, so it has given me enormous pleasure to research them in greater depth, delving into their origins and their truth or total fiction! In doing so, I have been helped by one particularly invaluable reference, Weather Lore, first published in 1869. Richard Inwards FRAS, its author and compiler, and at one time President of the Royal Meteorological Society, would doubtless have been acquainted with Admiral Robert Fitzroy, Superintendent of the Meteorological Office, who coined the term weather forecast in 1861. On 1 August that year The Times printed its first Meteorological Office forecast, predicting fine weather across Britain. However, traditional sayings had to suffice for another 11 years, following a barrage of criticism from the Royal Society.

Among the many other references I have used, two deserve particular mention. One is The Country Calendar, or The Shepherd of Banburys Rules, a reprint of the 1827 edition with a commentary by Professor G.H.T. Kimble. The original sayings and observations of one John Claridge, first published in 1670, resulted from some 40 years of experience and record-keeping, with particular reference to the life and needs of the shepherd. The other is The Farmers Friend of 1947 by W.S. Mansfield, director of the Cambridge University Farm, which combines weather sayings with the up-to-date knowledge of the times. My thanks are also due to Neil Baber and his team at David & Charles, and to Beverley Jollands for her assiduous editing.

Today we are as concerned with the long-term future of our climate as with what the weather will do in the next hour or two. As I write this on a wet and chilly late spring Dorset day, towards the end of the coldest winter for 30 years, it is hard to conjure up the prospect and consequences of global warming. But the weather and the climate should concern us all, and while it is amusing to look back to the weather prophets of the past we must also keep our own records of the weather and use them to help become its guardians for the future.

Ruth Binney

West Stafford, Dorset, 2010