Rain (4 page)

In some parts of the South-East, hail will add to the storm’s fury – though fortunately, given the vineyards and the tender, ripening hops strung on their wire frames, not here in Kent. The parson/naturalist Gilbert White’s delightfully precise journals record frequent thunder and hail storms in August; for instance, on 14 August 1791 he wrote:

On 14 August 1975 a violent summer storm hit Hampstead, depositing huge hailstones and three months’ worth of rain amid intense thunder and lightning. The day had been stiflingly hot, the city’s ‘heat island’ effect adding to the build-up of warm, stagnant, moisture-carrying air; the storm was triggered by an updraught caused by the high ground of Hampstead and Highgate, and having formed, it stayed there, depositing all of its rain and hail in one area as there was little wind at cloud level to move it along. One eyewitness account published in the
Journal of Meteorology
read: ‘At the height of the deluge, for about twenty minutes, this entire area … was completely covered by a heaving off-white crust of hail nearly a foot in depth’; another reported that ‘hailstones were like ping-pong balls (say 18 to 20 mm), lightning was like “machine-gun fire” and the water flowed off the heath in “waterfalls”.’ The storm flooded all the houses on Tufnell Park Road, some to a depth of two metres.

But it’s not just rain and hail that have been reported to fall from the sky during storms. In the first century ad, Pliny the Elder documented falls of frogs and fishes, and to the great fascination of schoolchildren (including
myself), reports have continued to come in from around the world ever since. As recently as 16 June 1939, for example, it was said to have rained tiny frogs on the village of Trowbridge in Wiltshire. According to the
Meteorological Magazine
:

While several theories, from waterspouts to tornadoes, have been proposed to explain such phenomena, none has yet occurred in such a way as to be properly verifiable.

Fortunately my storm is of the more usual sort and the thunder and lightning soon pass – although the rain continues to pelt down. The air smells of ozone, created from oxygen by lightning, and also of petrichor, a chemical released by dry soil after rain. It’s exhilarating – though I can’t help but hope it eases up a little soon. Sheltering beside the Darent I’m drier than I would be back on the field path, but there’s no pretending I’m not getting wet.

William Hazlitt recalls Coleridge, on a trip in Somerset, ‘running out bare-headed to enjoy the commotion of the elements’, and while, like him, I enjoy thunderstorms now, I was horribly afraid of them as a child. The house opposite ours was struck by lightning one evening when I was about five, and nothing I have heard since has ever seemed so loud and so terrifying. My parents were entertaining friends downstairs: there will have been vol-au-vents, probably, and Dad’s jazz playing on the record player that Mum had saved up Green Shield stamps to buy. I had been put to bed in my Spider-Man pyjamas and wasn’t allowed to disturb them, but the thunderclap ejected me from my bed and deposited me halfway down the stairs where I sat and wailed until one of my sisters came to comfort me. But for many years after that, electrical storms – particularly at night – had a particular, lonely terror.

Eventually, to help me outgrow the memory’s power, I deliberately went outside during a thunderstorm. It was during my second year at university, and I was sharing a little house in the centre of Oxford with a friend and my then-boyfriend; he and I climbed out of a little window in the topmost room to sit on the tiled roof as thunder echoed flatly among the old buildings and lightning struck the towers and spires around. It was only much later, after we had come in drenched and drunk on adrenalin and Jack Daniels, that I thought to worry
about the lead guttering we had so cavalierly been resting our feet on.

The trees I’m just as cavalierly sheltering beneath now have their roots in the Darent; but beyond the wide water meadows are hedgerow oaks, and on the heavier clay soil of the ridge, where I stood earlier and admired the view, are sweet chestnuts coppiced on a rough fifteen-year cycle. Before the rain the topsoil there was parched, but most trees draw their water from much deeper down where the earth very rarely dries out, a big tree taking up as much as five hundred litres a day. As moisture escapes from their leaves through transpiration – its rate increased by the hot weather we’ve been having – it pulls an unbroken column of water up through tubes in the tree’s tissue, and the network of roots with their tiny hairs draws in more from the surrounding soil. I remember all this clearly from GCSE biology – I can still picture the diagram of a root in our textbooks, with its neat apical meristem, xylem and phloem vessels – but out there in the fertile Kent countryside, summer rain pelting down, it is as though I can feel it going on all around me: the intake and outbreath of water that’s brought the land to life from time immemorial.

Today’s rain won’t all be taken up by plants and trees, though. A large proportion of it will simply evaporate from the top layers of the soil and the drenched leaves
and grass once the sun comes out again; some will find its way by surface run-off or soil interflow into the Darent and away to the Thames; and if enough falls, some will sink down to recharge the chalk aquifer deep below my feet.

The storm relents a little, and putting up the hood of my anorak I set out again. Maize must have been grown somewhere nearby, probably to feed cattle; there’s evidence of it in a badger scat by the path. The brocks will be deep in their setts now, snoring in the nests of dry grass or straw that they change regularly; but despite the weather those other burrowers, the rabbits, are seemingly not all underground.

Without the dense under-fur and guard hairs of creatures like hares, rabbits can become wet quite easily – and wet animals lose heat fast. But because they need their food to be over 50 per cent water, rabbits like to feed at dawn and dusk when the dew is down – or when the grass is rain-soaked, as it is now. All I see of this one is a white scut bouncing away into the scrub woodland at the field margin where a dozen more are doubtless waiting for me to pass, eyes wide, ears swivelling, every so often twisting around irritably to groom stray raindrops from their fur.

The meandering course of the Darent straightens as it nears Lullingstone Castle, evidence of past projects to manage its flow and provide power to long-gone mills.
A swan drifts, moored to its dimpling reflection, and a couple of fishermen are sitting out the rain in little tents on the bankside, rods propped above the slow-moving water. According to my map there’s a trout lake on the other side of the river, created from old gravel pits, but I’m walking fast now with my head down and don’t see it: my lightweight anorak is doing a passable job but my jeans have turned clammy and clinging from mid-thigh down to ankle, and I’m beginning to suspect that my trainers are letting in rain. I leave Lullingstone, and the nearby Roman villa, unvisited.

It’s only a mile and a half to Eynsford and its pubs though, and I’d much rather be out in the weather than at work – wet jeans or no. Consulting the damp paper instructions one more time I take a road that tracks the river on its right, with arable fields stretching up and away to the left: some have already seen the combine, but not all. I hope that the sun comes out again and it stays fine for the rest of the harvest; a lot may have changed in modern agriculture, but good weather in late summer is still essential for farmers. A wet grain crop may not be lost any more, but it must be dried before it can be stored, and that costs money.

Eynsford after an August thunderstorm seems a shadow of its usual picture-postcard self: nobody picnicking on the village green, nobody taking photos of the pretty ford and arched bridge. The church crouches
stoically, its wet spire aloft like a finger held up to test the weather; the castle looks deserted, and the pub only harbours a couple of punters in polo shirts and deck shoes, a Porsche Cayenne and a BMW Z4 parked out the back. The drenched summer bedding in its window boxes, probably glorious a month ago, looks tired and past its best.

Walking back to the station after a drink and some time spent drying out I search in vain for the remnants of an avenue of trees that my printout tells me were planted as a mnemonic, the first letter of each spelling out a line of a poem by Robert Browning: ‘The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.’ I find an oak for O, a beech, several ashes and a sycamore, but I can’t find the variety of species the quotation would surely require – and with the rain still falling, though not nearly as heavily as earlier, I don’t linger for too long.

Back at home I check anxiously that the gutter at the front of the house hasn’t become blocked and overflowed again; thankfully, it remains clear. Inside I find the dog asleep under my desk, a sure sign there’s been thunder here, too. There’s a music festival at the weekend that some of my friends are going to and I wonder if the summer storms will clear by then, or whether there’ll be Pac-a-Macs and power cuts, cheap tents adrift on flash-flooded fields.

I hope not, of course – yet there’s something salutary about the way our best endeavours can still be scotched by something so simple and primordial as the weather: it keeps us in our place somehow, reminds us that we are still part of the natural world, and not above it. Nobody wants rain on their wedding day, and the damage wrought by storms and flooding can be terrible – but imagine a world where the weather had been regulated and tamed, where nothing inconvenient ever happened, and our activities were never curtailed. There’d be no heatwaves nor early frosts; no more wet Wimbledons or mud-fights at Glastonbury. There’d be no lightning storms for Coleridge, or sudden downpours for Swift – and I can’t help but think we’d be much the poorer for it.

A few months after she won the Man Booker prize for her novel
The Luminaries,
Eleanor Catton revealed that she had done a lot of hiking as a child, and that her father had given her two pieces of advice about which she had had distinctly mixed feelings. The first was, ‘Nature looks more beautiful in the rain,’ and the other, ‘A view needs to be deserved.’

Both ring true to me – as does her ambivalence. My father’s most frequent aphorism when walking with us children on Dartmoor every year was ‘Rise above it!’: rise above tiredness, frequently, or steep climbs; but very often, rise above rain. The six of us – you may picture us in cheap 1970s cagoules and sodden bellbottoms – grew up loving the moors in all weathers, and it was just as well: as an area of high ground between two sea coasts, Dartmoor does get a lot of orographic, or relief, precipitation, particularly on its western-facing slopes and on the high ground:
‘Nine months’ winter and three months’ bad weather,’
as the local saying goes.

The average October rainfall here is 212 mm – more than double the national average of 94.1 mm. But in the autumn of 1946, 174 mm of rain fell in just
twenty-four hours at Princetown, on the high moor. Fortunately the weather isn’t nearly as bad as that when we park up at a windswept crossroads not far from the famous Devon village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor. It is raining, though: the kind of thin drizzle, almost mist but quick to soak through clothes, that can blanket the high moor, obscure landmarks and prove treacherous to those who lose their way. ‘Dimpsey’, the locals call this weather, but while some may find it dull and miserable, as we walk I can almost hear my mother quoting Emily Brontë:

Born and brought up in Indian hill country, my mother loved the English countryside – Dartmoor particularly – and was capable of a childlike rapture that embarrassed me as a teenager, but which shaped me nonetheless.

Today’s walk begins with three tors, then takes us down off the moor through a steep, wooded valley of the River Dart before climbing back up for one final summit and back to the car. The wet weather will make
it feel longer than its seven miles, I know, but with four tors to climb it will, at least, be eventful.

We sit in the rain-speckled car to pull on our waterproofs and lace up our boots, the dog whimpering impatiently from the boot. When at last we set out I can almost sense – as though in a timeslip – our later return to the waiting car, sore-footed, tired and triumphant. But there’s a long, wet-weather hike to do first.

Joseph Taylor, in his
Complete Weather Guide,
says of October:

Season of mists, indeed – although the mizzle that chills our faces and hands as we set out and shrouds the distant tors in grey is a distinct step up from that. Taylor is right about the colours, though: the purple heather may have finished flowering but there is still some willowherb and hemp agrimony blooming on the wet
roadsides, the hedges are full of sloes and haws and the moors flicker and flame with damp, dying bracken and yellow-flowering gorse.

We cross the empty road and set out for the first tor, a tumble of granite slabs like grey horse dung on the horizon. Underfoot, the rain-soaked moor is a mosaic. Its close, springy turf is starred with tiny yellow tormentil and blanketed in parts with intarsias of purple heather; longer, sandy-coloured moor grass is cropped down in places by cattle. There is also prickly gorse (also known as furze, or whin), which is nibbled into mounds by sheep and often shelters rabbits beneath, and swathes of tall bracken, green in summer and rusting to yellow and brown in autumn – which nothing eats. There are very few trees, though here and there a hawthorn struggles into a bent, wind-wizened shape, and in a couple of places fragments of ancient, stunted oak woods survive among the rocky clitter. These are magical places, as I discovered one day when a sudden rainstorm blew across the moor, driving me to find shelter.

It was my first trip back to Dartmoor since childhood; I was in my mid-twenties, lost and at a low point, and an obscure homing instinct drove me back to the place I had loved as a child. The night before I left London I’d dreamed that the roof space above my tiny bedsit was full of water, the ceiling bulging and dripping onto my bed; a sense of unease dogged me all the way west on the
train. I stayed at a shabby B&B in Widecombe whose owners clearly wanted to take care of me, dropping me off in their battered 2CV each day so I could walk the places I remembered. That day I’d set out from Two Bridges and hadn’t been walking long when the weather changed; at first, I tried foolishly to shelter under a stile, laughing despite myself as I crouched pointlessly in the lee of its narrow foot-plank, lashed by rain. In a break in the weather I made a dash for Wistman’s Wood, where tiny, gnarled oaks footed in moss-covered boulders and hung with beards of lichen and epiphytic ferns protected me from the worst of the downpour that followed. I remember the feeling of being somewhere enchanted, almost out of time; and also the fragile sense of acceptance the half-hour I spent there brought.

Mosses, lichens and bryophytes do well on Dartmoor – as you’d expect from somewhere with excellent air quality and plenty of rainfall. The area became a vital source of sphagnum moss during the First World War when it was gathered in great quantities, dried and sent off to be used in wound dressings due to its absorbency and healing properties; it’s been shown to slow the growth of fungi and bacteria. Twelve species are found on Dartmoor, and all can hold eight times their own weight in rain: their slow decay, over thousands of years, is what created the peat that lies over Dartmoor’s granite bedrock. Dried sphagnum, prized still for its
water-retentive qualities, is available by the sack-load in garden centres for use as a soil conditioner today.

The old man’s beard that colonises Dartmoor’s pockets of wind-bent trees is also said to have antibiotic and anti-fungal properties. Each unearthly, grey-green, podded cluster slows the rain’s progress down from the branches and into the soil, the tangled fronds of lichen dripping long after each shower has passed, slowing evaporation and helping to keep the air in these ancient little rainforests moist.

Usually the views from the high ground are staggering, the moor opening up for ridge after tor-topped ridge all the way to the far-distant sea, but today we can only see for a mile or so. The sky is grey and low, crowding around us like an inverted bowl, and the air is thick and dull. A clear day may make for more pleasant walking and better visibility, but these low clouds and rain are helping to maintain Dartmoor’s precious blanket bogs, now seven thousand years old. And anyway, it seems to me that if you only ever go out on sunny days you only see half the picture, and remain somehow untested and callow; whereas discovering that you can withstand all the necessary and ordinary kinds of weather creates a satisfying feeling of equanimity in the face of life’s vicissitudes that may or may not be rational, but is real nonetheless. I feel pleasingly resolute as we crouch in
the lee of the tor’s grey summit to strap a waterproof coat on the dog before setting out for the next tor, a mile or so away across the open moor.

Dartmoor formed from a giant batholith, a slab of once-molten magma that has been weathered down over millennia and had peat accumulate on it to create an upland area of poor, acid soil studded with granite outcrops that mark the densest remaining areas of the impermeable bedrock. Today’s rain, light though it is, is part of that weathering process, chemically breaking down the exposed granite and feldspar of the tors and penetrating their fissures until, when winter comes, ice segregation will begin minutely to break the stones apart, eventually producing gravel, quartz sand, silt and china clay. Some of Dartmoor’s several hundred tors have become mere scatters of rocky clitter on a hillside, the ghosts of tors long gone; others, like Haytor, still loom vast, monumental and deceptively invulnerable. Most, for now, are somewhere in between.

The sculptor Peter Randall-Page is fascinated by granite and the way it weathers down to produce other rocks like sandstone, limestone and shale – not to mention all the soils derived from them. In 1991 he took six Dartmoor moorstones, sculpted them and sited them in the nearby Teign Valley as part of the Common Ground charity’s ‘Local Distinctiveness’ project. One, split in two and intricately carved on its inner faces, sits on a
tiny island in the river Teign; another, in a wood, has water flowing from its summit; a third was built into a gap in a drystone wall. All are publicly accessible. For him, granite is the most elemental of stones: ‘stuff personified’ as he calls it, ‘quintessentially dumb matter … the mother of all rocks’.

We’re climbing the second tor’s slopes through sodden, browning bracken when we find it: three vertebrae, human-sized, chalk-white but fused between with bright orange cartilage. Next there’s a rib, and then another, chewed a little at the ends; then a wide smudge of fleece pounded by perhaps a year’s rain into the turf and looking like nothing so much as sodden tissue paper thrown carelessly down. A few paces on we come across a whitened skull with its empty eye sockets and one curly horn; like the vertebrae, it’s been picked completely clean by microorganisms, and washed by a winter’s worth of rain.

Rain is essential to the process of decay, providing the moisture that fungi and detritivores need to survive. Without enough rainfall, decomposition can slow right down, plant matter desiccating, dead animals – if they are not scavenged – becoming mummified, as saprophytic bacteria and moulds struggle to take hold. Too much rain, though, can be equally bad: prolonged flooding can produce anoxic conditions in the top layers
of soil and lead to a rise in toxic by-products of decomposition, such as hydrogen sulphide – which in turn makes it difficult for worms and other invertebrates to survive. Soil fertility depends on the decay of plant and animal matter, aided by five million nematodes, ten million bacteria and ten thousand million protozoa per square metre of soil, and the autumn rain that’s falling softly around us today is helping everything rot down, from the browning bells of the heather to horse dung and the remains of this dead sheep.

Not that the living ones we pass seem very bothered. Whiteface Dartmoors, bred to cope with the poor upland grazing (and to withstand the weather), they are ‘hefted’ or ‘leared’ to a patch of this unfenced landscape from which they won’t stray, and the knowledge of which will be passed down from ewe to lamb: where to take shelter when the rain really sets in, where the best moor-grass is and where water may most easily be found. It won’t be long until these ewes are brought down off the moor to be bred, but for now they graze, dirty grey between the grey rocks and sky, utterly unperturbed by the drizzle that beads on their lanolin-rich wool. The Dartmoor ponies with their thick manes and tails are the same, the guard hairs of their winter coats shedding the raindrops easily so their skin beneath remains dry.

After Top Tor the sky lightens slightly and the mizzle fines briefly away, though the sun can’t quite break
through the low cloud. ‘Rain in the air has … the odd power of letting one see things in the round, as though stereoscopically,’ writes Nan Shepherd in her extraordinary paean to upland landscapes,
The Living Mountain.
‘New depth is given to the vista … when the mist turns to rain there may be beauty there too.’

We can see other walkers on the next tor, the bright dots of their wet-weather gear incongruous against the old landscape – as must be our own. Two buzzards wheel easily overhead, looking for carrion or any small mammals that might take advantage of the brief respite from the weather; a fox scat, dissolving in the rain to grey fur and little bones, shows that there are plenty about.

By the time we’re coming down off the moor the drizzle has thickened again. We pass through a gate fastened with a lovely old iron latch, twisted and looped and hung with a single silver droplet of rain, and take a little sunken farm track down into the valley. The old bitumen has been entirely lost from the two edges, which now gurgle with fast water; a channel has also been scored through the centre, exposing the loose stones and rubble beneath. It’s clear that at some point in the long, wet winter a great quantity of water ran off the moor and down this lane.

Several rivers are born on the moor: the East and West Dart, of course (which meet at Dartmeet), but also the Bovey, Avon, Erme and Plym, the Teign, the East and
West Okement and dozens of tributaries and man-made leats dug to take water to individual farms and hamlets. And on a day like today you can see (and hear) the rain coming down off the moor in a thousand places. Tiny becks and rills, too small even to have a name, creep in creases through peat or make use of paths; water sheets sideways across roads and trickles down field drains; it gurgles at roadsides and swells the moorland streams, where it can find them, until they roar white and unstoppable on stony beds. Thinking about the water coming off the high ground calls to mind Alice Oswald describing the source of the East Dart in her hypnotic, ventriloquial, forty-eight-page narrative poem,
Dart
: