ISSN 1758-6488
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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
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Just as the world neatly divides into people who have peeled the rubbery rind off a golf ball in order to find out what it’s made of, and those who haven’t, so there are people who have always wanted to open up and peek inside the white louvre shutters of a Stevenson Screen, and those who haven’t.
It looks like an abandoned art installation in the landscape, or a holy site of worship. Electric druids who had recourse to B&Q. Tuned in to and highly sensitive of its surroundings, it feels physically apart from them, although it’s easily passed by and overlooked. It’s quiet in the low hills to the east of the M6 near Lancaster, apart from the odd car tooling down the back lanes hidden by hedges; the distant, soft, constant roar of the motorway; a dog barking in the boarding kennels you passed on the way up.
Before our evening weather bulletins, following on from the news, before the effortless, studied or graceless handovers from news anchor to weather person, before the country is seen as a shiny whole, as if from the height of an observational satellite, before predictions are made with much priestly gesticulation and the sweeping of hands, before all that come places like this: a weather station a hundred or so metres above, and a few miles inland from, Morecambe Bay.
Weather stations can – indeed, have to – be found scattered everywhere across the country, although the physical interference created by the human-built environment means their sites tend to favour out-of-the-way edgelands, where they are also less likely to interfere with a view. Not that many people see them. From a car, maybe a mast set back from the road, a strange obelisk, and what looks like a beehive on stilts. Then it’s gone.
All weather stations are at once different and the same. Different, in elevation and aspect, local topography, the method of information capture – some are live and linked to the Met Office, providing hourly, synoptic readings, others have an archival function – but similar in the deployment of standard operating features and kit you’d expect from a unit that exists solely to provide clean and accurate climate data for analysis. The whole set-up is like a capillary action between the elemental and the empirical, a place where sea mist rolling in off the bay or a blustery shower is being translated into raw information.
In a manual station, it’s also a kind of landlocked lighthouse-keeping, a real edgelands job. Somebody has to be here – in this case, every morning at nine o’clock – to make the vital observations. Morning rounds with one gigantic patient.
This one has a shed, which, like all the best sheds, is busy inside with arcane clutter: superannuated meteorological equipment, a grey metal locker full of torches and spare wellies, a computer workstation. The implausible phone does occasionally ring. A few times in the course of a year, somebody will need to know exactly what the weather was doing locally at a given time. Loss adjusters and insurers query the sudden shower that is claimed to have turned a road greasy, or the strong sunlight that dazzled a rear-view mirror and blinded a driver. The weather station itself might be overlooked and unseen, but it is constantly vigilant and recording.
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