That scary time of year when it won’t stop raining…
TOMORROW in the old Celtic calendar marked the festival of Samhain, the beginning of winter and the year as a whole. Back then, the year was split into two rather than the four seasons we identify with today. Samhain meant the onset of six long months of darkness so fires were lit, animals sacrificed and people feasted their sorrows away.
The Christian festival of All Saints, out of which Hallowe’en has grown, was fixed on November 1 in the 8th century and has also come to be seen as a time when the darkness surrounds us.
Perhaps that is down to the weather at this time of year – often suitably wild. October is usually the wettest month of the year and that of 2020 is certainly proving true. It is the first time (in the south of England at least) when snow or air frost might be expected but it can also be exceptionally mild.
The coldest Hallowe’en on record occurred in 1926 when temperatures of -10.6C were recorded at Wolfelee in the Scottish Borders. The warmest, readers may well remember, was in 2014 when a sickly yellow sun shone and a temperature of 23.6C was recorded in Gravesend, Kent and Kew Gardens in London.
This weekend, thanks to a slippery egg yolk of low pressure systems over the Atlantic, it’s going to be wet and windy. Two separate weather systems will drift over to the north west of Britain bringing strong wind and yet more heavy rain.
Tonight, mindful of our ancient traditions (and due to all other activities being curtailed under Tier 3 restrictions), your weather correspondent will be venturing to some local woodland to tell scary stories with friends.
I’m still deciding on a suitable one: how about that October when it started raining and never stopped…