snow patches | Wanstead Meteo

Back in the days of proper winters folk had it hard, especially those living in the Cairngorms. And probably none more so than Bob Scott who experienced more than his fair share of severe weather.

Reading Adam Watson’s fascinating memoir of his time with the legendary Bob Scott o’ the Derry I picked up this fascinating account of the time he had to hand over navigation to his horse, Punchie, to guide them home through a blizzard in January 1952.

Watson writes on his conversation with Scott:
“…it was the worst storm I’ve ivver been oot in, on my wey hame fae the Linn in the aifterneen. The drift came on sae thick I couldna see the horse’s heid as I sat on the sledge. I couldna have got hame if it hadna been the horse”.

A gale battered his face with suffocating drift. He judged that he must be near the Derry wood, but the storm now became violent. He had to turn his head away and let Punchie take over. Suddenly the gale dropped and the drifting stopped as a dark wall loomed yards away, the lodge wood! Snow still fell thickly, but he had shelter and knew where he was. Punchie had come right to the narrow gap where the road entered the wood.

Watson’s book It’s a Fine Day For The Hill is a beautiful memoir packed with anecdotes of his life in and around the Highlands.

The route from Inverey to Luibeg, the ‘most beautiful part of the Cairngorms’

I spent last weekend in the Lake District, on Saturday ascending both Scafell and the Pike, England’s two highest mountains.

The 964m Scafell, though lower than the Pike, is a much more technical ascent with hard to negotiate gullies, among them Lord’s Rake, where I discovered three lumps of icy snow. My findings, that I later Tweeted, attracted the attention of Iain Cameron, who, with a team of volunteers, maps and measures all British snow patches that survive through the summer.

I’ve read about Iain’s findings in the Royal Meteorological Society‘s journal Weather but to find one of these surviving patches myself enabled me to empathise just why he and others find the task of mapping and measuring them fascinating, a sort of first-hand insight into how the UK’s climate varies from year to year.

On descending from Scafell I thought I’d seen further patches lower down but these turned out to be melted puddles on the moorland that were reflecting white against the bright sky.

It was a cracking weekend weatherwise. Though the wind on Sunday was fairly brisk at the top of Hellvellyn it didn’t impact much on the conditions. Two dry days in a row with excellent visibility are rare at any time of year in the Lakes. I can’t wait to return.

Meteorology-based musings about east London and beyond