“Rain is co-author of our living countryside: it is also a part of our deep internal landscape, which is why we become fretful and uneasy when it’s too long withheld. Fear it as we might, complain about it as we may, rain is as essential to our sense of identity as it is to our soil.’ (Harrison, 2016)
For those of you who follow me on instagram, you will know I have just spent two days walking the South-West Coast Path. In the days running up to my departure, I checked the forecast every hour or so with ever increasing gloom. The prediction never changed: eighty per-cent certainty of thundery showers and heavy rain, for a substantial section of Sunday. I almost cancelled my plans. Visions woke me in the night of being caught atop a clifftop amidst lightning strikes and having to explain my foolhardiness to the lifeguards who had to rescue me.
But this walk had been a long time in the making. It had been seven years since I’d set off alone on the train to Falmouth, to walk back the 56 miles to Looe over five days. It had nearly destroyed my feet but the memory of the sheer joy of walking by the sea kept me going in some dark times since. Just like I was inspired back then by reading a book (Wild by Cheryl Strayed), so it was this time that reading Wanderers: A History of Women Walking by Kerri Andrews provided the necessary impetus to finally make some concrete plans. I could only spare two days this time, so I booked an overnight stay along Whitsand Bay, non-refundable, lending a certain commitment to my plans whatever the weather.
I got wet just running from the car to the bus stop to catch the Yelverton-Plymouth bus. It was not a good omen, but as I sat on the top floor of the double-decker bus that wound its way over Roborough Down, the rivulets of heavy rain gently subsided to a quiet patter. it was going to be alright. But by the time I’d walked the mile or so across town to the Cremyl Ferry, the ancient ferry across the Tamar to Cornwall, my legs were soaked. That pattern continued for the whole morning, heavy downpour, a brief easing off, steady rain again. As I walked I kept thinking about Melissa Harrison’s book - Rain: Four Walks in English Weather - so I thought when I got home I’d share a review I wrote some years ago with you. The video at the end is from Sunday morning as I took shelter in a folly in Mount Edgecombe estate. I’ll be back tomorrow to share more from my walk...
If you live in England, rain is a fundamental feature of your life. Never far away, sometimes a real inconvenience, often a talking point, but always essential, it forms the backdrop to our days and underpins our verdant landscape. Rain by Melissa Harrison is a short book published by another of our national institutions, the National Trust; it’s an evocative and informative ode to the wet stuff, told through four walks, in four different places around England, at four different times of year.
A visit to the Lake District inspired her to celebrate this aspect of weather that we tend to avoid wherever possible; having lived there myself for ten years, until the annual metres of rainfall drove me south again, I understand her inspiration but don’t quite share her delight in rain. But she manages to convince me, through her sparse and careful writing, that the phenomenon of rain is worthy of more respect, both from a botanic and topographic perspective, and from within our own cultural entanglement with it.
Her prose is steady and clear, peppered with folk wisdom, cultural history, and excerpts from English literature and poetry inspired by rain. She has a knack of evoking the feeling of setting out on a walk, and the experience of being right there in a landscape, with compelling descriptions of nature surrounding her. I learnt some facts about places and creatures that I didn’t know before, and as I always do when I read nature writing, I felt closer to nature and more inclined to go out and experience it for myself.
As an aspiring nature writer myself, I have found it helpful to analyse Melissa Harrison’s accessible writing – she moves with ease between recounting her experiences of the landscape for the reader and giving factual and often scientific information about the causes, phenomena, and connections of what is going on in a landscape when it rains. It is a tricky balance to strike. One notable paragraph speaks of the movement of water up the trees and plants in a landscape following a thunderstorm:
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 is 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 since time immemorial.
I finished Rain this weekend, whilst Storm Freya sent dustbin lids flying through the air, tossed the yew tree about like a rag doll, and blew rain sideways along the decking. Although Harrison thinks saving the outdoors for fine weather only leaves us ‘untested and callow’, on this occasion I thought it safest to stay indoors. But I will look at rain differently from now on. I will make the effort to go out in all weathers, to experience the entire landscape, not just one that is bestowed with sunshine and blue skies. Hopefully in doing so, like Harrison, I will discover I can ‘withstand all the necessary and ordinary kinds of weather [to create] a satisfying feeling of equanimity in the face of life’s vicissitudes’.
Love the sound of rain, captured so wonderfully in your video! I tend to prefer being inside with a good book when it's bucketing down, and yet it's often not as bad as I expected when I do venture out in it. What a difference good waterproofs make. And how many years it took me to realise that and make the investment. Off to catch up on the next instalments in your SWCP journey now. x