Sunshine, snowfall and the policeman they called Tomintoul

TUESDAY was a fine spring day. I could walk the dogs without a jacket, feel the glow of soft sun on my face. I sat for several hours reading in the garden, by the plum tree creamy with blossom and to the cooing of collared doves on the chimney.

Then, in the evening I had to go out, under a lowering sky and ominous peals of thunder. As I motored up the road, I saw what seemed like smoke on the hillside, pierced by a lonely shaft of cross sunshine. Then I realised it was a shower of snow, even as its wetter, sleety relation began to plop on my windscreen.

Snow never seems to happen when you want it. The first flakes on a steely November afternoon befit the advent of winter. We all want our Christmas amidst scenes of Dickensian drifts. But emphatically you do not want snow when the trees come into first mint-green leaf and you feel like tea on the lawn with amiable company or a good book.

Being Scots, though, we do have to put up with a great deal we do not want – and, alas, lashings of the white stuff in April are far from uncommon.

We forget that the notorious winter of 1946-47 was, in the main, a notorious spring. It snowed in March, it snowed in April and it snowed again in May.

Though Britain had an abundance of coal, piled supplies froze solid and, even as men battered away with picks, trains struggled to transport it and power stations were shutting down for hours on end.

The winter of 1954-55 was so mild that, in its wisdom, Ross and Cromarty shipped all its snowploughs on Lewis to the mainland. Then, in April, the island was hit by prodigious snow, cutting off all the country townships from the fleshpots (and supplies) of Stornoway.

After a few days, dozens of alarmed men on the west coast rallied bravely, fetched their shovels, commandeered a lorry and, for hours and hours and with stuttering progress, dug their way over the moor to town – returning triumphantly at oh gosh o’clock to their communities with food and tobacco and, no doubt, a sma’ refreshment.

I have seen the Pentland Hills, slouched behind Edinburgh like grumpy old men, dusted with snow even in early summer, have woken to hard frost of a May morning.

In June 2010, visitors were still flocking to the Cairngorms for days of excellent skiing, and as recently as 2015, some patches of snow in our highest hills survived all summer.

Snow can fall on the summit of Ben Nevis at any month of the year and, as late as the 1700s, you could have visited the Cairngorms to admire a real live glacier.

OUTER Hebridean crofters always anxiously await sneachd nan uan bheag – the ‘lambing snow’ – which falls usually at the end of March or the beginning of April. It is wet and slushy and never lies long, but you do not want the sheep lambing before it happens and you do then pray for settled, mild weather to follow – for below 12C, grass will not grow.

Nor is snow all that can fall icily from the sky. On June 9 last year, much of Scotland was lashed by prodigious showers of hail. Traffic on the M9 was brought to a standstill as drivers had to pull over, unable

safely to steer or see. The same day also treated us to lightning fireballs, localised flash flooding and, on higher ground, even snow.

Cars bobbed helplessly about in an awash Bearsden and one home in Lenzie was blasted by lightning and was shortly ablaze.Not exactly a day for Hawaiian shirts.

This week, though, we cannot be accused of keeping the white stuff to ourselves. Icy Cumbrian roads on Tuesday night caused a 25-vehicle pileup – fortunately without injury. Snow yesterday blanketed roads in Northumberland and fell as far south as the Midlands – and the weathermen warn of yet further falls and frost this week.

There are eccentric responses to extremes of weather either side of the Tweed, of course. As little as a centimetre of snow can trigger entertaining panic in the Home Counties, with commuter gridlock, cancelled trains and much Guildford gloom at the prospect of three days without fresh olives.

In Scotland, it is a heatwave that sends us ever so slightly mad. The paunchy, pallid and middle-aged resort to shorts and T-shirts, workmen everywhere are suddenly ‘taps aff’ and Mrs Tweedie heads in to take her first class of double maths in a wild, floaty, floral frock bought on impulse in 1989. Everyone tries to look cool in somewhat dated sunglasses and, by lunchtime, city parks everywhere are a sprawl of still, supine, tanning bodies, as if there had been some terrible disaster.

IN late June 1976, Scotland was hit by what remains, I think, the most searing heatwave of my lifetime. Ladies’ heels gouged the pavements as tar melted, lads fried eggs on car bonnets because they could and AG Barr had to double production of Irn-Bru.

You had to drive with all windows open – no air-conditioned cars in those days – and drape towels on vinyl seats otherwise too hot to sit on.

Students partying on Kilcreggan beach lit an enormous bonfire at dusk and unwittingly melted the telephone line between Greenock and Helensburgh. At a menswear store in Glasgow, the manager simply moved his desk outside to the pavement, in preference to suffocating.

A French lass even ended up at the city’s Central District Court after being arrested when – for a bet of 50p – she stripped to the waist in a sizzling George Square. ‘It’s not quite as good as the Folies

Bergere,’ sniffed the stipendiary magistrate.

But it is a stretch of lonely Grampian road that is most infamously associated with extremes of weathers – known to locals as The Lecht and, to the rest of us, as the A939 from Cock Bridge to Tomintoul.

It slithers to more than 2,000ft above sea level and is so vulnerable to snow that gates are permanently in place quickly to close it. The highway can disappear for days on end under the drifts. Its first mention in Radio Scotland’s traffic reports (usually in October or November) is, really, the start of winter official.

In 1963, one old man in the area woke up to find his house quite entombed in snow. The only exchanges with neighbours could be through his chimney – and it took them three days to dig him out.

Then there was the morning of whirling flakes, sheet ice, the school bus crawling between 10ft walls of impacted snow and everywhere a sea of white. ‘I wouldn’t have minded so much,’ sighed one lady, ‘but this was June.’

Glasgow police still fondly recall two ponderous officers, in the early Nineties, who had long been nicknamed Cock Bridge and Tomintoul.

They say it was so hard to get through to them.