The weather has been behaving badly in recent weeks switching straight from summer to winter. Dave Hewitt reflects on the wild winds and snow.
Strange weather lately. First we seemed to switch from high summer to early winter with almost nothing recognisable as autumn in between. Only three Sundays ago, on 6 October, a crowd gathered on Dumyat to mark Rob Woodall's completion of the mainland Marilyns, the third person known to have done this after Ann Bowker who was there and Ken Whyte who wasn't. (Pictures - including one of a rather fine whisky-soaked black bun - at web.ukonline.co.uk/mountains/dumyat).
Woodall typically headed straight off south to complete another list, the Dewey 500s on Seat Robert near Shap but the rest of the party adjourned to my place - just a couple of miles from Dumyat - for an afternoon of tea, biscuits and nattering on the patio. Both the on-hill and domestic parts of the day took place under ceaseless warm sunshine that wouldn't have seemed odd in mid-June. (Mind you, mid-June 2002 was atrocious.)
Then the rains came for a couple of days (perhaps that was autumn) before the cold winds blew and the snow started to settle on the tops. Alan Dawson and Mary Cox have just returned from a week in Strathconon where they managed a total of seven Corbetts and Grahams in conditions that could have passed for midwinter.
"The average snow depth was 50-60cm on the tops," Dawson noted on the relative hills newsgroup (www.yahoogroups.com/group/rhb), "much more in places. Everything plastered above 400m." The pictures he placed on the site certainly bear this out. One day the pair traversed the Graham and the Corbett either side of Gleann Chorainn. "It's about 5km from Beinn Mheadhoin to Bac an Eich," Dawson wrote, "and it took nearly five hours." And these are fit people, no slouches.
In former decades an early dump of snow was very much the norm but even then this amount of the stuff would have been worthy of comment. Take for instance the situation at the Lecht, where the ski centre was, very unusually, able to open for business in October. The snow appears to have been pretty widespread across Scotland - the Borders were affected for a while, a contact in Ballachulish said they had plenty, and even here beside the Ochils the snowline dipped to 400m for a while.
Then there was the wind, with the biggest of the autumnal gales sweeping across much of southern and middle Britain at the weekend. Assessing wind strength is a highly subjective problem, governed by so many localised features that it's hard to ever say, definitively, that such-and-such a gale was the worst the country has seen in living memory or whatever. OK, so a simple maximum-gust figure can be produced for each storm but that's to dumb down a complex weather form. Quoting the "pure" figure of the highest gust says next to nothing about its impact on the ground, for instance.
A huge factor in the perceived strength of any gale is the time of year in which it occurs. Summer gales - where "summer" is broadened to mean any time when leaves are on the deciduous trees - is likely to cause much more damage and death than is a winter, leafless gale. Slates and spires are equally vulnerable at any time of year but heavily leafed trees catch the wind like yachts in full sail and it's hardly any wonder that they tend to keel over.
The "Michael Fish hurricane" of 1987 - in which an estimated 15 million trees fell - was a "summer" gale, occurring, like the recent effort, in mid-October. Another month and it would have had a considerably smaller impact. Sevenoaks might have retained its seven oaks, or at least two or three of them.
A good example of this situation in reverse came this past winter, with the daylong gale that hit central Scotland at the end of January. This caused considerable mayhem but had it arrived during the leafy two-thirds of the year then goodness knows what might have happened. The actual strength of the gusts (and there were a great many very strong ones) was such that in pure windspeed terms it couldn't have been far off equalling the 1987 southern effort and it was almost certainly bigger than last weekend's gale.
I was witness to the potential for damage in Stirling where, within a few metres of each other, a huge tree had toppled to completely block a road - thankfully with no injuries - and a large roadsign on a roundabout had been bent at more than 60 degrees as the wind strained to release it from its poles. The potential for havoc from thin metal roadsigns frisbeeing about the town didn't bear thinking about. It would have made Odd-Job and his hat look inconsequential.
Returning to the hills, another example of the effect of leaves will be known to anyone fond of venturing out by moonlight. This is essentially a winter sport, as the moon is higher and brighter in the dark months and has the good grace to appear at a civilised time of the evening. But while a September or October "moonwalk" is just about feasible in terms of up-top conditions, it can come as something of a shock to return to a wooded glen, with one's night vision well worn in, only to enter near total darkness because the leaves are blocking all the moonlight that would normally filter through without difficulty from November to April. Obviously a heardtorch resolves this but there's something a tad defeatist about switching on a torch during a nightwalk, especially at the very end. The satisfaction from having coped with several totally torchless hours is a profound one and it always seems a shame to spoil it at the end.
Back to the winds. Mainstream media reporting is far from reliable on this, on at least three counts. One is that the south (by which I mean everything bottom-side of Buxton) has fewer bad-weather events over time and so, when a big gale does come along there is a tendency to exaggerate, to - er - overblow. Second, the "national" media is so heavily London-based and metropolitan-biased that few reporters have any real conception of just how routine a strong gale can feel on Shetland or above Strathcarron. And third, because so many more people live down south, because there are far more trees to topple (look how much green there is on a map of Surrey for instance) and because there is so much more transport infrastructure to disrupt, there is an genuine increase in the potential for disruption, destruction or even, as last weekend, death when the winds blow across the more populous areas. To adapt the cliched old saying, if a tree falls in Glen Affric the chances are that no one will see it; if a tree falls in Godalming it might well come down on someone's flimsy-roofed car.
Clearly last weekend's gales were on the hectic side of normal, and it was interesting to read a report from Richard Webb, a keen Scottish hill man who hails from the Welsh border country and who lives in Wolverhampton. He likes his orienteering and on Sunday was booked in as a marshal for an event on the Malvern hills (which are normally extremely pleasant strolling country if you're ever down that way).
As with Alan Dawson's snow report, Webb provided the relative hills newsgroup with his observations. "Unfortunately, after an enjoyable but highly dangerous trip, which involved carting a rowan off a dual carriageway in Dudley, the event had to be cancelled. The control flags kept blowing away. We split up into groups to hunt for flags and gather in the survivors. Fortunately I got the highest control, just below the summit of Worcestershire Beacon. A wind-assisted ascent and then a detour to the top. Wind was NFS (Normal For Scotland: would not implode car windows etc). Very wild but great views. A few local walkers (travel was difficult and very risky) had the good sense to make the most of the interesting conditions and were staggering up the ridge."
That was the OK part of the day. Webb then wrote: "A couple more controls to collect on the north-west shoulder of the hill and this is when all hell broke out. This was as strong as all but my five or six windiest Scottish days. The first time I have ever been in such a wind in safety - it's not so relaxing on the Cairngorm plateau when you get knocked down. It was as hard to get down as to get up. Fun fun fun."
Further to the north-west, Dewi Jones in Porthmadog has been in touch to say that the gale there was "spectacular" and that a gust of 112mph had been recorded at Clogwyn Station, 750m or so up Snowdon. The highest summit gust was "only" 103mph. Nothing as drastic seemed to have occurred in Scotland this time but the day will come in due course.
There is much to be written about low-level or mid-height gusts outgunning summit blasts, and - particularly - about outlying, on-a-limb hills being un-stand-able-on while their parent summits are breeze-like and benign. But more on this another time. The wind and the weather isn't a subject likely to lose its topicality.
Dave Hewitt
31/10/2002
Dave can be contacted at Dave.Hewitt@dial.pipex.com
