The Highlands and Islands of Scotland (eBook)

1

The Weather Man

At 4.40 a.m. precisely, on the morning of 1 June 1881, a tall, redhaired man closed the front door of his lodgings at Banavie, a hamlet between Corpach and Fort William. Carrying a pack containing instruments, notebooks, some food and waterproofs, he crossed the Caledonian Canal near the series of locks known as Neptune’s Staircase. Once across the bridge over the River Lochy, he found a path on the south bank of a fast-flowing stream, the Allt a’ Mhuilinn, and began to climb Ben Nevis. It was the first of 153 consecutive ascents of Britain’s highest mountain. Every day between 1 June and 31 October, whatever the conditions, Clement Wragge climbed 4,411 feet from sea level to the top of the great mountain.

The variable weather conditions were the point. Clement Wragge was a meteorologist, uncharitably known to some of his associates as ‘Inclement Rag’, who was absolutely dedicated to the gathering of accurate, sequential data that would inform the developing science of weather forecasting. It was the invention of the telegraph in 1835 that made forecasting viable and the safety of British shipping that made it highly desirable. The volume and value of sea traffic around the Empire was vast and if meteorologists could warn mariners about impending storms, then fewer lives and fewer cargoes would be lost. A network of weather stations was set up by the coastguard service and coordinated by the Board of Trade. When the Scottish Meteorological Society mooted the idea of an observatory on the summit of Ben Nevis, there was great enthusiasm for the project. The mountain stood directly in the path of storms blowing in off the Atlantic and consistent readings of air pressure, temperature, rainfall, cloud and fog cover, and much else, would create an unrivalled bank of data that would allow meteorologists to discern patterns and issue good forecasts that could immediately be telegraphed great distances to shipping and elsewhere.

When Clement Wragge heard of the Scottish Meteorological Society’s proposal, he immediately volunteered to climb Ben Nevis every day for five months. The readings he took would prove the value of a permanent observatory and also help raise the funding needed to build it. Independently wealthy, Clement did not seek payment for this remarkable, punishing and sometimes dangerous programme of work, and nor did his wife, Leonora. While Wragge climbed the mountain, she took hourly readings, despite having two children to look after, at what they called their sea-level station at Banavie. These allowed simultaneous comparisons of data gathered on the same day. It could be sunny and calm at sea-level and windy and raining on the summit of Ben Nevis at the same time.

As he climbed the mountain, Clement stopped at regular intervals to take readings. At Lochan Meall an t-Suidhe, what he called the Halfway Lake, he would later set up a Stevenson Screen. Designed by Thomas Stevenson, the father of the great novelist, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the builder of spectacular lighthouses around Scotland’s coast, these were essentially instrument shelters. Square boxes with double-louvred sides, they were always painted white in order to reflect sunlight and set up on supports that stood between four and six feet off the ground. The screens sheltered thermometers, barometers and other instruments.

In good weather, Clement could reach the summit in less than four hours, not counting his stops at six points on the way up to take readings. But conditions could change quickly and suddenly become very dangerous, especially in thick fog. The summit is a stone- and boulder-strewn plateau with sheer cliffs on three sides and in his diary Clement recorded that he sometimes took a guide, a local man called Colin Cameron. Here is part of an account of the end of the first season of ascents (Wragge wrote reports of his work for the scientific periodical, Nature):

The conditions of weather on Ben Nevis are now such as to render it impracticable and hazardous to continue the daily observations satisfactorily. I have therefore judged it best to discontinue them, after a very successful season, under the auspices of the Scottish Meteorological Society, of five months from June 1, without the break of a single day. The work at the six intermediate fixed stations has, I am very pleased to say, been well and generally punctually kept up throughout, and I trust that much goodwill will result. Simultaneous observations were of course made at the observatory at Achintore [near Banavie], Fort William. The Stevenson’s screens at these stations have now been made firm by wire stays to withstand the storms of winter. Yesterday Colin Cameron, the guide, accompanied me. The track was snowed up, and it was necessary to force a way through great banks and drifts of snow. The average depth was two feet; once we got off our course in the blankness of thick cloud-fog and trackless snow. To-day the weather was very bad on the summit, the hut was partly filled by drift, and the south-east gale was so violent at times that I could hardly make way. Possibly I shall attempt weekly or periodical ascents during the winter to keep up the registrations of the rain-gauges and self-recording thermometers.

In the course of the first summer, gangs of workers had climbed Ben Nevis to install instruments in a shelter built from sturdy angleiron and covered it with a tarpaulin. Its skeleton can still be seen, stayed and securely anchored, having survived the gales of more than 140 winters. The hut mentioned by Clement was a rudimentary shelter built as a last, safe resort in bad weather and a place to shelter from the icy winds and make notes. There exists a photograph of him coming out of the door, preceded by his dog, a Border collie. He wears a double-breasted jacket, a cloth cap, what might be jodhpurs and knee-length leather boots. Clamped in the corner of his mouth may be a pipe. The slightly blurry photograph looks as though it was not posed and Clement seems a wiry, leathery, thin, even cadaverous man; the physique of a marathon runner, perfect for an amazingly arduous programme of work.

The sun shines in the shot, but the design of the shelter speaks of extreme weather. Built with massive boulders and stones picked up on the summit plateau, it is little more than six feet high, with no windows and not much bigger than a garden shed. The roof is a tightly tethered tarpaulin. It has been roped to what might be wooden beams wedged about halfway down the walls and kept securely in place by the weight of five or six courses of the large stones laid over them.

Nature published details of the beginning of the second summer of data gathering in 1882:

. . . the heavy work of reopening chiefly consisted in digging out from the vast accumulations of snow the barometer cairn, hut, and thermometer cage which here, as a safeguard, incloses Stevenson’s screen. The snow, in fact, was nearly four feet deep, and it was necessary to cut out wide areas around the instruments . . . I had also to fix a new roof of ship’s canvas to the rude shanty that affords some little shelter from the piercing cold and storms.

Through articles like these and other reports, Clement Wragge’s work caught the public imagination and funds were quickly raised for the building of the observatory. Both Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales contributed. The job of superintendent was advertised but despite his pioneering and voluntary efforts, Clement was not appointed. It seems that he was an eccentric, irascible man who perhaps spoke his mind too readily. Nevertheless, the data he so doggedly gathered and was carried on for thirty years by the observatory was a unique model, still the most complete record of high-altitude mountain weather that exists in Britain. No doubt stung by such a blatant rejection, Clement and Leonora sailed with their children to live in Australia. He continued his work in meteorology and we have him to thank for the irritating habit of giving people’s names to hurricanes.

What Wragge saw from the summit of Ben Nevis on clear, graphic, sunlit summer days must often have been spectacular. He saw the Highlands. In every direction, he looked out over spectacular and unique geography. And in the Highlands and Islands geography made history. To the north the Torridon mountains of Beinn Eighe and Liathach are visible, to the north-east the peak of Morvern in Sutherland, to the south Ben Lomond can be clearly made out and beyond it, the Irish coast. Over to the west, Clement saw Loch Eil snake into the Moidart mountains and Loch Linnhe lead the eye south-west to the ocean and the Hebrides. But perhaps most important to an understanding of Highland geography was what lay immediately at the foot of the great mountain, what Clement crossed every morning to climb it.

The Great Glen, An Gleann Mòr, the fault-line that runs northeast from Fort William to Inverness is a memory of an immense, slow-motion collision that took place hundreds of millions of years ago, one of three that formed the geology, the geography and the history of the Highlands.

Hugh Miller was fascinated by the age of the earth. Born in 1802, a Cromarty stonemason to trade, he was a geologist by vocation. His work in the quarries and his walks along the rocky shorelines on the Moray and Cromarty Firths had long stirred his curiosity. The strata he saw, making ‘a right use of his eyes’, and the fossils he picked up convinced him that the earth was very old, despite his deeply held religious beliefs. Miller’s famous book, The Old Red Sandstone, described sedimentary rocks laid down hundreds of millions of years ago...