NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley

I HAD never experienced anything like it. It was an autumn day in 1973 and I was walking with the Hanlensian walking group in the Berwyn Mountains of North Wales.

We were walking along a north–south ridge when the cloud cover dropped dramatically and we experienced a cloud inversion.

That is when cold air at ground level is overlain by warmer air above and the cloud flips. The group were treated to the tops of the mountains of Snowdonia rising island like above the mists while we appeared as if we walking above them.

I was thinking of this episode on a fine June day with the wispy cloud far above.

It made me wonder about the types of clouds that we will see above the skies of Leek.

I am sure clouds must have attracted many myths and I found rather an attractive one from the Pueblo people of New Mexico.

They believe in the Cloud People, supernatural beings from the Underworld who bring rain to their fields. They are the spirits of the deceased who lived a good life and take on the form of clouds in the afterlife.

By giving honour to the dead, the Pueblo believe that the Cloud People will grant them rain, nourishing that they farm.

It was a Londoner, Luke Howard, who named clouds as we know them. He had observed the different shape over the years and developed the nomenclature system in a lecture in 1802 .

Cumulonimbus: A very large billowing cloud threatening rain and storms

Cumulus: Flat-bottomed, discrete and fluffy scooting across the lower part of the sky and indicating fair weather

Cirrus: Candy floss and made from ice crystals at high altitude

Cirrostratus: Duvet-like that forms a layer.

At the time when Howard was cataloguing his clouds, the artist John Constable was filling his art books with representations of clouds.

He painted hundreds of ‘noble’ clouds above his house on Hampstead Heath over two summers.

My favourite painting of clouds is that of ‘Woman with a Parasol’ by Monet of 1886. It looks like it is a windy summer day. The sky is full of movement and light with a palette of blues and whites taken from an unusual vantage point of Monet looking up at his wife and son.

Different dialects have developed ways in which to describe clouds. On Exmoor there is talk of a mackerel sky when the sky is dappled with striped cirrus. In Essex a cloud that widens upwards from the horizon and signals an approaching storm is a Noah’s Ark,

In East Anglia, white fleecy clouds which presage pleasant weather are called ‘shepherd flocks.’ Wadder head are clouds that form columns in Shetland.