Looks Like Rain E-Book

Damian Corless

• Herausgeber: The Collins Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

The name the Romans gave to Ireland was Hibernia, which means 'Land of Winter', and cold feet may have been a factor in their decision to leave the Irish to their own devices. The weather is our main topic of conversation and has done its bit in shaping our character. This lively overview shines a light on incidents when the weather – generally bad – changed the course of Ireland's history. Along the way it takes in those years – and there were quite a few – when the sun really didn't shine. We learn how Oliver Cromwell, invincible in war, most likely caught his death from a Cork mosquito. The Irish climate created the heavy soil that made the potato flourish in Ireland like nowhere else, with disastrous consequences. David Lean came to Ireland fully intending to give the County Kerry weather a starring role in his film Ryan's Daughter. He didn't make another film for fourteen years. Our professional forecasters still hedge their bets by predicting four seasons in one day – and still often get it laughably wrong. But there are sunny stories too, such as how, in 1973, the brooding Antrim weather produced one of rock music's greatest album covers, and how the Irish legend of the crock of gold at the rainbow's end came about. Remarkably, Ireland's weather has remained the same moderate mixed blessing since the Romans left.

Leseprobe

Looks Like Rain

9,000 Years of Irish Weather

Damian Corless, a journalist and a former editor of Magill and In Dublin, currently contributes to the Irish Independent. He has written comedy sketches for BBC TV’s classic Big Train and RTÉ’s award-winning Stew. His acclaimed books include GUBU Nation and The Greatest Bleeding Hearts Racket in the World. His most recent book, 2011’s You’ll Ruin Your Dinner, looked back fondly over Ireland’s love affair with sweets down the decades.

www.damiancorless.com

For Sophie, Ollie, Max and Caitlin. Enjoy! I’ll be testing you on it later.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1.

Island of Perpetual Gloom

2.

Never a Single Nail or Screw

3.

The Dark Ages Really Were Dark

4.

Is It A Bird? Is It A Fish?

5.

The Answer is 42

6.

When Murphy Says Frost, Then It Will Snow

7.

Ghost Ships and Crystal Pillars

8.

Waves of Mutilation

9.

When Weather Changed History – Part 1

10.

Rain and Slime

11.

Weather and Witchcraft

12.

When Weather Changed History – Part 2

13.

Toffee for the Northern Climate

14.

When Weather Changed History – Part 3

15.

A Tax on Heat and Light

16.

When Weather Changed History – Part 4

17.

A Man For All Seasons

18.

When Weather Changed History – Part 5

19.

Herrings Were Found Six Miles Inland

20.

Pills, Thrills and Weather Balloons

21.

The Measure of a Man

22.

The Other Potato Famine

23.

When Weather Changed History – Part 6

24.

A Mighty River in the Ocean

25.

When Weather Changed History – Part 7

26.

Death Blowing in the Wind

27.

Force 10 at Fastnet

28.

The World’s First Weather Forecast (Gets It Right!)

29.

Weather and Wireless

30.

Below Us The Waves

31.

Clocks and Cows

32.

The Farmer and the Fisher Should Be Friends

33.

When Weather Changed History – Part 8

34.

No Respecter of Fame

35.

Night Appears To Fall By Midday

36.

The Minister for Snow

Selected Bibliography and Sources

Acknowledgements

Thanks to The Collins Press, Faith O’Grady, Michael Gallagher, Professor Mike Baillie and Hugh Adams.

Introduction

‘Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.’

That witticism is commonly attributed to Mark Twain, although, like many bon mots attributed to the writer, he may never have said it. Of course, while the quote is in one sense a statement of the obvious, it’s not entirely true. The history of humankind is very much a history of trying to do something about the weather, from wrapping up in furs to ward off the cold to seeding clouds with chemicals to make it rain.

In Ireland, unlike lands with much more predictable patterns, the first obstacle to doing something about the weather is that we never really know what the weather is going to do. The Dublin writer Oliver St John Gogarty told of how he’d remarked to a man that the island was experiencing ‘the most extraordinary weather for this time of year’.

The man corrected him: ‘Ah, sure it isn’t this time of year at all.’

On a similar note, making small talk in the film Way Out West Oliver Hardy ventured: ‘A lot of weather we’ve been having lately.’

Ireland has a lot of weather. Grappling with four seasons in one day is a mundane condition of living here.

Except, of course, once we give it any thought we appreciate that the weather is anything but mundane.

On the contrary, the weather is one of the great unknowns – and arguably unknowables – facing all life on Earth.

Unknowable it may ultimately be, but that has never stopped people from trying to get to know it or – failing that – letting on to know it.

Attempting to put some sort of order on disorder is a primal human impulse. It is essential to our happiness and indeed to our sanity to feel we have some degree of control over the world about us. Big and scary and contrary, the weather has never hesitated to punish that sin of pride.

From the time of the ancient Babylonians, and probably long before, the art of weather divining has attracted more than its share of chancers and charlatans, along with earnest proto-scientists like Aristotle. For all its many faults, the Greek philosopher’s Meteorologica (Meteorology) remained the standard textbook on climate for some 2,000 years after its publication around 340 BC.

But even as the new scientists of the Enlightenment were picking apart Aristotle’s theories, the biggest thing in weather throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth was the hugely popular almanac. Scores of these publications in the Old World and the New purported to carry specific forecasts into the distant future. The great Benjamin Franklin published one of America’s best-read almanacs, while the not-so-great Corkman Patrick Murphy scored a runaway bestseller in the British Isles on the back of one blessedly fluke forecast. (See pp. 51–52.)

The appliance of science to weather forecasting has not always been appreciated by everyone. Indeed, it was – and remains – a frequent subject of scorn. When the visionary weatherman Robert FitzRoy set up the world’s first truly scientific network of weather-reporting stations around Britain and Ireland, the almanac publishers and shipowners led the clamour for his head on a plate and his system to be demolished. The former correctly feared that scientific forecasts would ruin their bogus business, while the latter were angered when sailors refused to put to sea in heed of FitzRoy’s storm warnings.

Today, for all the mod cons at their disposal, our professional forecasters regularly find themselves falling back on an age-old practice, described by the late doyen of Irish meteorology Brendan McWilliams as ‘the honourable ploy of hedging’. This is the practice whereby forecasters ‘hedge’ their bets by predicting every type of weather for the coming period in the hope of bluffing through.

While we have gotten the measure of our weather to a much greater extent over the past 300 years, it can still exert an almost supernatural presence in our lives. Like the Greek gods of old it is prone to the wildest mood swings, on a seeming whim lashing out in a huff or coming on all lovey-dovey.

The Victorian critic John Ruskin fabricated the term ‘pathetic fallacy’ for instances where we project feelings, motivations or intentions onto non-living things. The word ‘pathetic’ relates to ‘pathos’ or ‘empathy’ and isn’t meant to suggest that the delusion is wretched, pitiable or lame. In an exclusive interview for this book, Professor Mike Baillie of Queen’s University, Belfast, suggests that a close encounter with a comet long ago gave birth to the Cúchulainn myth, as the ancient Irish projected a superhero personality onto this terrifying apparition in the sky.

There can be no doubt that the weather is part of what we are, although there is great debate as to the size of that part and where it is to be found. There is sound scientific evidence, for instance, that the profusion of red hair and freckles in the Irish is a product of our sun-starved climate.

As for its effects on our national character (if we have one), on our alleged tendency to melancholy (if that’s true) and on our drinking, the jury is locked and is unlikely ever to agree on a verdict. The poet Wallace Stevens insisted: ‘The state of the weather soon becomes a state of mind.’ This view had already been considered and rejected by the literary maestro Samuel Johnson who rubbished the notion that the mood or mindset of a rational being could be in any way moulded by the weather. Johnson wrote disdainfully: ‘Surely nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason than to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence on the weather and the wind.’

For what it’s worth, after half a century living in, and with, the Irish weather, I think Johnson’s attempt to downplay so absolutely its influence on our world view and well-being is daft.

This book explores the profound impact of the weather on the Irish people since the first settlers arrived some 9,000 years ago. The main lesson I’ve learned in that exploration is that for roughly 8,900 of those years the actions of the weather were a desperately real matter of life and death. Going back just a very few generations, our agrarian ancestors lived precariously in the full knowledge that they were just one bitter winter or cruel summer away from starvation, pestilence and flight or death.

The other lesson learned is that while we have insulated ourselves from our weather to an impressive extent, we have never come near to taming it.

And I don’t believe we ever will.

Damian Corless, 2013

Island of Perpetual Gloom

A Warm Welcome for the First Settlers

TO THE ARABS OF NORTH AFRICA a thousand years ago, Ireland was a cold, forbidding place jutting out of the tempestuous and fearsome ocean they called the Sea of Perpetual Gloom. According to the twelfth-century geographer Al Idrisi, the few ships that left the placid Mediterranean to venture northwards did so only during the ‘favourable (summer) season, as soon as the weather is calm and the Sea of Perpetual Gloom is tranquil’.

A thousand years earlier still, the Romans had kicked around the notion of invading Ireland but then thought the better of it. Agricola, a Roman governor of Britain in the first century AD, calculated that a force of 6,000 crack troops could subjugate the entire island, but either he or his superiors developed cold feet.

Cold feet may have been a key factor in the decision to leave the Irish to their own devices. The name the Romans gave to Ireland was Hibernia, meaning ‘Land of Winter’. The Roman name seems to be a mistranslation or corruption of the Greek word ‘Iverni’ which referred to the people of the southern tip of Ireland. The Greek geographer Strabo claimed that the miserable climate was responsible for producing generation upon generation of cruel, cannibalistic savages who generally cursed their misfortune at being born in such a godforsaken place.

For the Greeks, the Romans and the Arabs settled around the sun-kissed Mediterranean, Ireland must indeed have seemed like the last place on Earth that anyone would choose to live. But choose to live there people did, despite the weather. Indeed, to the first arrivals, the Irish weather probably seemed very welcoming indeed.

As the ice sheets rolled back at the end of the last Ice Age around 9,000 years ago, the first people set foot in the newly uncovered Ireland. Who they thought they were, what they called themselves, and where in Britain or Europe they’d originally set out from is a matter of some dispute.

The first settlers arrived around the beginning of a particularly warm period known as the Holocene Climatic Optimum. This pleasant interlude kept Ireland up to 3ºc warmer than it is today for the first 4,000 years of human habitation, spanning from around 7,000 BC to 3,000 BC.

The first known settlements are concentrated in the northeast of the island, which leads some experts to believe that hunter-gatherers simply strolled across a narrow land bridge from Scotland which had yet to be covered by rising melt waters. The course of this land bridge would roughly coincide with today’s popular ferry route between Larne on the Antrim coast and Stranraer in Scotland.

A to Z of Irish Weather

Air Thermals A thermal is a column of rising air caused by the uneven heating of the Earth’s surface. These often rise above cities and towns, signifying ‘heat islands’ which trap more warmth in stone and concrete than is retained in less built-up surrounding areas. In 2012 a study by NUI Maynooth, which monitored fifteen weather stations for two years in the greater Dublin area, found that the night-time temperature in the centre of the capital was on average between 4 ºC and 8 ºC warmer than in the surrounding suburbs. By day it was 1.5 ºC warmer.

Anemometer The anemometer is a device for measuring wind speed and is commonly found in weather stations. The first surviving description comes from Italy around 1450, but the best-known type, the cup anemometer, was invented by Dr John Romney Robinson of Armagh Observatory in 1846. The Robinson Crater on the Moon is named after him, while his daughter married the Irish physicst George Stokes who conducted groundbreaking work on light, rainbows, clouds and waves. See Stokes’ Law.

Anticyclone The opposite of the familiar, unsettled low-pressure cyclone, which rotates anticlockwise above Ireland (as it does in all of the northern hemisphere), the high-pressure anticyclone rotates clockwise and is associated with dry, clear weather.

Augurs These forecasters of Ancient Rome had a wide-ranging remit which included predicting the weather. They watched for auspices of things to come, and paid particular attention to the behaviour of birds. The augurs of Celtic high society ranked below druids but above bards.

April April was the second month of the ten-month Roman calendar before January and February are said to have been added around 700 BC by King Numa Pompilius, who may or may not have really existed. Despite tweaks to the Western calendar, it has remained the fourth month ever since.

August The eighth month of both the Julian and Gregorian calendars, August was named after Augustus, the ruler who transformed Rome from a Republic into an Empire with himself as the first Emperor.

Depending on whether the climate was blowing hot or cold, the Scottish–Irish land bridge may have sunk below the waves and resurfaced a number of times in the 3,000 years before it finally disappeared around 9,000 years ago, when global warming finally turned Ireland into an island.

Some geologists believe that there were several trackways joining Ireland to Britain stretching from Antrim in the north to Waterford or Cork in the south. These would account for the fact that red deer, wild boar and other large immigrant animals had penetrated independently into the midlands, which were cut off from the first settlements by distance and thick forest.

This theory of southern land bridges is also favoured by those who believe that Ireland was initially settled by groups of Iberian beachcombers who followed the coastline newly exposed by the retreating ice from northern Spain to Ireland, grazing on relatively easy pickings along a thousand-mile shoreline smorgasbord of shellfish, seabird eggs and other convenience foods.

Ireland became an island long before neighbouring Britain, which retained its umbilical cord to Europe for centuries more. Ireland’s much earlier isolation meant that many varieties of plants and animals which reached Britain never crossed the Irish Sea. It is estimated that some 30 per cent of the plant and animal species that are native to Britain, snakes being an obvious example, never reached Ireland.

For every expert who leans towards the land-bridge theory as the gateway for Ireland’s first post-Ice Age settlers, there’s another who argues that they most probably arrived by boat. The land exposed by the retreating ice was quickly covered by tundra composed of low-lying shrubs, sedges, mosses, grasses and lichens. But this in turn quickly gave way to thick forests which blanketed Ireland, Britain and most of Europe. For anyone wanting to get from Point A to Point B, it was often much quicker and safer to go by boat than to beat a trail through the dark, dense, scary woodlands populated by wolves, bears and evil spirits.

What To Wear 7,000 BC

Keeping Warm and Dry

There’s an old saying that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. This, of course, is only half right. The first people to settle in Ireland some 9,000 years ago will have encountered plenty of bad weather, but we can be sure that they arrived in clothing that was well tailored for the worst the elements could fling at them.

Because of Ireland’s damp climate, and the perishable nature of clothing materials, we have only fragmentary evidence of how Ireland’s first populations dressed to keep warm and dry. For an indication of the type of clothes they might have worn, we can look to Ötzi the Iceman, a mummy discovered in 1991 in the Tyrolean Alps separating Austria and Italy.

Although the Iceman lived around 3,300 BC, much later than Ireland’s first settlers, his well-preserved clothes will have differed little from those of the people who repopulated the continent as the ice sheets retreated. These people were well capable of making garments that were sophisticated, snug and superbly fit for purpose. And they had to be, in a time when the penalties for bad clothing could be far more lethal than ending up on a ‘Worst Dressed’ list.

Ötzi’s clothes were comfortable, warm and hard wearing. Apart from a cloak made of woven grass, his garments were entirely made from the skins of various animals. In addition to a leather coat, a belt, a pair of leggings, a loincloth and shoes, he also wore a bearskin cap with a leather chinstrap. The shoes were broad, waterproof and designed for walking across snow. They were made using bearskin for the soles, deer hide for the upper panels, and a stocking-like netting made of tree bark. The feet were well padded with soft grass and moss that keep them as snug as a pair of socks. Ötzi’s coat, belt, leggings and loincloth were fashioned from strips of leather sewn together with sinew. His utility belt had a pouch sewn to it containing a cache of handyman’s tools, including a scraper, drill, flint flake and a bone awl. It also contained dried fungus in what may have been a medicinal first-aid kit.

By the time Ötzi met his untimely end in the Alps, farming had been established in Ireland for around 700 years, providing the population with a yearly yield of wool from sheep and goats. The wool was often dyed before spinning and then woven into warm cloth. There is some dispute about when Irish flax was first processed into linen, with many experts dating it to the first century AD. Tanning and leather embossing were known from early times, and leather bags served as canteens for water before pottery became widespread. Simple slipper-like rawhide shoes made from a single piece of skin have been found, along with more sophisticated designs.

Over the millennia, from the arrival of the first people to the coming of the Anglo-Norman scribes who studied the natives with disdain, the fashions of the Irish evolved. One key aspect of the native dress which remained constant was the use of layers to keep out the wind, the rain and the cold. Multiple layers of clothing trap pockets of air which quickly absorb warmth from the body. These warm layers in turn keep the body insulated against the elements.

The Anglo-Normans, who arrived in the twelfth century, noted that the Irish wore a wide assortment of furs, including otters, seals, foxes, wolves, badgers and other wild animals. These highly valued furs were used as the first line of defence against the wind and the rain.

Generations of Irish schoolboys and schoolgirls were taught that the crowning glory of Irish clothing design, in terms of form and function, was the Irish Mantle. Some sources even refer to it as The Great Irish Mantle, to convey its tent-like qualities.

One influential eyewitness who thought the Irish Mantle was something short of great was the leading Elizabethan Edmund Spenser, one of the most illustrious figures in English poetry. Spenser spent much of his later life in Cork during the period of the Munster Plantation. It was there that he made friends with his neighbour and fellow planter Sir Walter Raleigh, and there where he is said to have composed sections of his groundbreaking masterpiece The Faerie Queen.

It would not do Spenser’s memory a disservice to say that he feared and loathed the native Irish. In his 1596 pamphlet, A View of the Present State of Ireland, he argued that the land would never be fully ‘pacified’ until Irish ways and Irish laws were purged from the face of the Earth. In fact, his solution to England’s ‘Irish Problem’ was nothing short of genocide.

At best, Spenser could muster a grudging respect for the all-purpose, all-weather Irish Mantle. He wrote: ‘It was their house, their tent, their couch, their target [shield]. In summer they wear it loose, in winter wrap it close.’ Passed in 1366, but more observed in their breach than their observance, the Statutes of Kilkenny banned the English settlers from going native. This ban, which specifically forbade the wearing of the Irish Mantle, was supposed to save them from degenerating to the level of the savage Irish.

In Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, he presents the mantle as a symbol of decline and descent into bestiality. He asserts that the mantle started out as the noble cape of ancient Egypt, Israel, Greece and Rome until with ‘the decaie of the Romaine Empire’ it fell into the hands of barbaric societies like the Gauls of northern Europe and the Sythians of the Near East. The poet went to great length to denigrate the Irish Mantle as the camouflage of a sneaky fighter and the pop-up bed of a prostitute. Other agents of Elizabeth’s rule in Ireland weren’t put off by this black propaganda. In 1599 one English army quartermaster submitted a request for a shipment of Irish Mantles for his wet, cold and miserable troops, noting that the native garment was far superior to anything the English had in their wardrobes. Shortly after the English victory over a combined Spanish/Irish force at the 1601 Battle of Kinsale, Queen Elizabeth I posed for her famous Rainbow Portrait in which she reasserted her dominion over Ireland by draping herself in a multicoloured Irish mantle.

As mentioned, the climate encountered by Ireland’s first settlers was reasonably mild. The summers were rarely scorchers, but equally the winters were mostly tolerable. The first settlers no doubt regarded the wishy-washy Irish weather as a mixed blessing, but they would have been wise enough to appreciate that its absence of extremes was a boon. Its general lack of a vicious streak was a deeply attractive quality to people who were acutely aware at all times that they existed precariously just one cruel winter or one failed harvest away from the next life.

Perhaps remarkably, Ireland’s weather has remained that same moderate mixed blessing down to the present day, with very few deadly twists and turns over the course of the past 9,000 years. There have been some extreme episodes of prolonged famine and pestilence down the millennia, but the rarity of such fierce disruptions serves to underline just how stable and dependable Ireland’s climate has been for its people.

For comparison, let’s take North Africa. As the first hunter-gatherers arrived in Ireland around 9,000 years ago during the Holocene Climatic Optimum, the landscape of North Africa was being transformed beyond recognition by the Holocene Wet Phase. As humans began pushing into Ireland, the Sahara was being swamped with wave upon wave of new settlers, as monsoon rains transformed the North African plain from a featureless desert into a lush, green paradise swarming with wildlife.

Some 3,000 years later, when the first farmers arrived in Ireland with their packages of seeds and domestic animals, the Irish landscape had altered but the weather which greeted them from day to day and year to year wasn’t much different from that encountered by the first arrivals, and not much different either from what we put up with today. By the time farming was becoming widespread across Ireland, however, North Africa was experiencing another massive climatic upheaval. The flow of monsoon rains diverted southwards, and humans were driven off the Sahara as it rapidly reverted to the harsh, lifeless desert it had been before.

Never a Single Nail or Screw

The Thatched Roof

THE HISTORY OF IRISH HOUSING is the history of keeping out the rain, and the thatched roof has been part of that history from the time people first set foot on this island, or not long after.

Weaving or layering plant material into shelters has been around from the dawn of mankind and remains one of the most popular forms of roofing in the world today. Historians believe that the first hunter-gatherers to arrive in Ireland around 9,000 years ago would have been skilled in the techniques of making fairly watertight roofs from a thatch of broom, rushes and reed, plugged with heather, mosses and mud. It may be, however, that the very first explorers carried their own camping gear comprised of animal skins stretched over poles, and that these skin shelters served very well for some time.

Around 4,000 BC the Neolithic agricultural revolution arrived in Ireland, bringing a package of new cereals, including wheat and barley, together with new fashions in housing. While the king of the new cereals, wheat, settled uncomfortably into the damp Irish climate, barley and rye fared better. Grain and chaff made up around half the volume of the new cereal crops. Once that half had been separated out, the 50 per cent left was straw, consisting of the dried stalks. The many uses of straw included brick-making, rope-making, animal feed, bedding, basket weaving and thatching.

After thousands of years as the most indispensible roofing material in the land, thatch began to fall out of favour in the early years of the twentieth century. From the 1920s the new Free State government began providing grants for home improvements, and in 1936 the Minister responsible, Sean T. O’Ceallaigh, told the Dáil with evident satisfaction: ‘Concrete floors are substituted for earthen floors, and timber work renewed as required. In some areas thatch roofs, which necessarily require attention frequently, are being removed and replaced with either native slates or concrete tiles of Saorstát (Free State) manufacture with the assistance of the reconstruction grant. The low, unsightly and unhealthy corrugated iron structures which hitherto were to be seen in some of our rural areas are also disappearing and are being replaced by well-ventilated rooms of adequate height with slated or tiled roofs.’

The main arguments of the Free State’s modernisers against thatched roofs were that they leaked, that they had to be replaced every few years, that it was becoming ever harder to secure the services of a skilled thatcher, and that when you could get a thatcher, he’d charge you an arm and a leg. Traditionally the skills and trade secrets of the craft had been handed down from father to son, but the flight from the land, and from the island, was thinning their ranks dramatically. And thatching wasn’t something that could be picked up easily from a DIY manual. As one writer pithily observed: ‘Trying to explain to a lay person how to thatch a house is like describing to someone who has never worn a shoe how to tie a shoelace. Very nearly impossible.’

For the record, the straw thatch of a new roof had to be first stitched into the frame with a needle two feet long. It was then fastened down hard with hazel and willow twists. A proper thatcher would never use a single nail or screw to secure it to the joists. Rethatching an existing roof, meanwhile, required another skill set.

While the Fianna Fáil housing minister O’Ceallaigh was preaching the advantages of slated and tiled roofs, The Irish Press, the newspaper set up as his party’s mouthpiece just five years earlier, was running a counter-campaign to save Ireland’s thatched roofs. In a 1932 feature headlined ‘Will The Thatchers Die?’, the Press put the decline in thatching down in large part to snobbery and what it felt was the decidedly un-Irish trait of keeping up with the Joneses.

A to Z of Irish Weather

Bank Holidays In 2012 Gerald Fleming of Met Éireann revealed on the TV documentary Weather Permitting: ‘Bank holiday weekends are a forecaster’s nightmare. Expectations are sky high – levels are in the heavens. No one likes working on a bank holiday because you’re on a hiding to nothing if you get it wrong.’

Baths The hot bath was a favourite means of easing away the worst effects of the Irish weather in Celtic society. Luxuriating in a hot bath is a recurring boastful feature of tales detailing the lifestyles of the rich and famous in ancient Ireland. Every monastery kept a bath in its guest house for distinguished visitors.

Bealtaine The ancient Celtic May Day festival to celebrate the waxing power of the sun, marked with bonfires and feasting.

Beaufort Scale Properly titled the Beaufort Wind Force Scale, this system devised by Meath man Sir Francis Beaufort measures wind speed by relating it to observed conditions on sea or land. (See pp. 119–124.)

Blizzard A very cold, strong wind (Force 7 or above on the Beaufort Scale) laden with snow.

Boyle, Robert Born in County Waterford in 1627, Boyle was a natural philosopher, physicist and chemist and is best known for devising Boyle’s Law which defines the relationship between the pressure of air and its volume. Amongst other things, Boyle’s Law is the principle governing why weather balloons are only partially inflated at launch. As the balloon gains altitude, the air pressure decreases and the gas expands. Being partially inflated at lift-off enables the expanding balloon to reach its intended altitude without mishap and remain aloft long enough to gather the desired data.

Bus Shelter The bus shelter has been a symbol of urban decay and moral rot since it first appeared in Irish towns, providing the punch line to the joke: ‘What do Northsiders use for protection during sex?’ In 1946 a scheme to provide many of Dublin’s main routes with bus shelters was abandoned due to wanton vandalism after just twenty-two had been erected. The glass in many was smashed, while in some cases thieves swiped the large panes intact for recycling as windows. A letter writer to The Irish Press that year suggested that the shelters were too good for the uncouth Irish public who would be better served with ‘sturdy corrugated iron structures instead of glorified glasshouses’.

The paper lamented: ‘One of the causes for the decline of thatching was a silly notion of inferiority. People thought that it was backward to live under thatch; they thought that they went up the social scale when they put slate or tiles over their heads.’ Arguing that ‘wherever there are thatched houses there is beauty’, the Press writer added: ‘Not that the rugged Irish slate looks badly. It is more agreeable to the eye than the sleek Welsh slate. As for tiles, now being introduced in many places, they are a miserable commercial imitation of a thing which is beautiful enough in its own county, but alien and inharmonious when brought to us. Cotswold tiles are one of the graces of a peculiar West of England architecture. The imitation tile in Ireland is a disgrace.’

Two years later, in 1934, The Irish Press was still waging its losing battle to persuade the homeowners of Ireland that thatch was best. It reported a widespread disillusionment with the new style of house popping up everywhere, insisting: ‘When the medical officers visited the people in their up-to-date residences, complete with all modern conveniences, they were met with a barrage of complaints. Women alleged that they and their families were “perished with the cold”, that all the windows made the place draughty, and that the “old thatched cottage with all its faults was a palace compared to the damp new house”.’ The paper said that a skilled thatcher ‘will take a week to roof a small dwelling at a cost of around £5. A large house may cost £30.’ The Press conceded that the modern thatch didn’t last quite as long as the old thatch, because mechanised threshing techniques ‘break the barrel of the straw’. Even using machine-damaged straw, a new thatched roof would keep out the rain for four or five years.

By 1970 even The Irish Press had given up on its hopes that the thatched roof could be saved as a quaint feature of the Irish landscape. That year Galway County Council appealed to Local Government Minister Bobby Molloy for a special grant to replace thatched roofs with slate or tiles. It reported: ‘Of the 2,961 “unfit” houses in the county the large majority are thatched cottages which have fallen into disrepair and for which thatchers cannot be got.’