Summer? Glorious to grim in just 24 hours
THEY say a week is a long time in politics – but when it comes to weather in Scotland, 24 hours can seem pretty lengthy as well.
On Friday, two-year-old bathing beau Harrison Downie raced happily through the surf on the beach at Irvine in Ayrshire, as a heatwave served up a sizzling afternoon by the sea.
Fast-forward 24 hours and a pair of beachcombers cut a forlorn sight at the same spot, beneath leaden skies of cloud, thunder and fork lightning.
Rare warnings of lightning strikes had been issued earlier for large swathes of the country, from Inverness in the North to Dumfries in the South. These expired at 10pm last night. The weather website lightningmaps. org showed the location of dozens of strikes by mid-afternoon, mostly on the Clyde Coast but reaching as far as the West Highlands and later into Edinburgh and the East.
The conditions which gave Scotland sky-high temperatures will have vanished as July begins tomorrow.
The Met Office said the system of high pressure which resulted in our mini-heatwave is now too far away from Scotland to have an impact.
The country still managed to turn in respectable temperatures yesterday, when 26.1C (79F) was recorded at Fyvie Castle in Aberdeenshire. But Monday’s high will be just 17C (63F), compared with Friday’s blistering 30C (86F) at Achnagart in Ross-shire.
Large areas were under weather warnings from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency last night. Met Office forecaster Craig Snell said: ‘It’s not the greatest start to July.’