Cloud. We're intimately familiar with it in Scotland. We spend one half of our leisure time cursing it for obscuring the mythical golden orb in the sky and pouring rain on us, and the other half blindly stumbling through it on murky hillsides.
Such is life in Scotland, but if you’re anything like me then you’ve probably done more than your fair share of cursing AND blind stumbling this winter.
Provisional statistics from the Met Office show that Scotland, on average, notched up just 100 hours of sunshine this winter. That’s barely more than one hour a day! 78% of normal. I don’t need Met Office statistics to tell me the obvious, though. All I need do is consult my mirror.
‘Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the palest of them all?’
By this time of year my face should be bronzed from a winter trudging up snowy hills in sunshine. Well, not sunshine per se, more sunny intervals with the obligatory exfoliating wind, but according to my mirror we didn’t even get that.
As a redhead I can cope with being pale but the final straw came on 28th February, the last day of the meteorological winter, on the last of just three snowy walks I managed all season. Ben Wyvis, Ben Vrackie and Beinn a’ Bhuird. Sunshine was forecast on all three occasions but all three failed to deliver. All three were shrouded in cloud despite occasional teasers of hope.
Cowering behind the Clergyman’s Stone that afternoon as the horizontal snow blew past, I pondered my cloud-thwarted winter. If I’d had the power to banish cloud there and then, forever, I’d have done so.
But suppose I had that power and Scotland was now fated to be a sun-kissed, parched paradise for all eternity. What would I have deprived us of?
Tempting as it is to demonise cloud and see it as just a big grey wet blanket hovering at hill level, as an obstacle that limits our enjoyment in the hills, it’s just not that simple. Had I banished clouds in that moment of frustration I’d have overlooked the fact that they are responsible for some of the most perplexing and memorable sights you are likely to see.
The unique beauty of cloud and its ability to enhance our outdoor experiences was brought home to me right at the start of the winter. I was half way between Sgurr Mor and Tom na Gruagaich on Beinn Alligin, in Torridon, under an almost-clear blue sky.
As I approached a bump on the ridge the bright sun became obscured and, instantaneously, that made something incongruous appear in the clouds above the bump:
It stopped me in my tracks.
The cloud in question was that lovely, wispy, ruffled stuff that looks like ripples on wet sand. Cirrocumulus, one of the highest cloud types at between 20,000ft and 40,000ft altitude. But that was merely the canvas onto which something much more colourful was painted. A beautiful shimmering radiance, looking like mother of pearl.
This phenomenon doesn’t have a fancy name. It’s simply called an iridescent cloud. They appear when water droplets or ice crystals bend the different wavelengths of sunlight as they pass through the cloud, and separate them into distinct coloured bands or patches.
Much of the science of refraction and diffraction goes over my head, instead I’m content to just stand there and gawp at the beauty of it all. Had it not been cold to the point of discomfort on that ridge then I’d have stood and gawped all afternoon. I’m not sure how rare they are but certainly I couldn’t recall having seen it before, but it stands in stark contrast to the months of gloom that followed.
But such is the nature and variety of cloud, where it can both disappoint and delight on different occasions and in different places. Sometimes that can happen on just one hill in the space of a few minutes, with cloud rolling in or clearing in an instant.
Arguably though, that narrow zone between disappointment and delight is precisely where you want to be if you want to stand a chance of seeing that most enigmatic and sought-after phenomenon, a brocken spectre.
Here’s one I photographed on East Lomond in Fife last winter.
Named after the German mountain where it was observed by theologian Johann Silberschlag in 1780, a brocken spectre is an ethereal, elongated figure surrounded by a rainbow-like aura.
The aura itself is called a glory and, as with iridescent cloud it involves light being scattered as it interacts with cloud particles. Frankly, the science matters little when you’re confronted with something so rare and mesmerising, but the spectre itself is easier to get your head around.
That’s just your shadow, cast as you stand directly between a low sun and the mist or cloud. If you’re too high above the cloud you won’t see a brocken spectre, and if you’re too low in the cloud then the sun won’t cast a shadow. You need to be right on the line between the two, both in sunshine and in cloud.
Even though there’s a scientific explanation for these apparitions I’m still somewhat in awe of them. The spectre often appears huge and distorted because of the ever-changing movement of the cloud and the lack of any reference points, so that even though I know it’s my shadow, it takes on the characteristics of someone else. That’s probably why I move my arms around, just to check that the spectre is me and not someone else.
<Ben looks behind him, nervously>
It’s a strange illusion that can’t help but reinforce your sense of self, especially when you’re alone in the hills.
Brocken spectres alone make me thankful for our profusion of cloud, but my most memorable walks do tend to be the ones where I witness that interaction between the hills and low-level cloud as they fight for supremacy. Walks when you’re not sure whether or not you’ll get sunshine, where shafts of sunlight break through a gap, and peaks poke up through an inversion layer of cloud into the dazzling blue above. Blanket blue sky lifts my spirits but cloud-borne beauty inspires awe and humility.
And what of rainbows? We’ve all seen a fair few of those in our time but we wouldn’t get those without clouds. Or how about sunsets?
What is a sunset without clouds? It’s just a slightly graded pastel hue stripped of features or texture, deprived of the reflecting glow of cloud bases and denied the oranges and purples you only see when the sun’s setting rays hit the very highest cirrus clouds. Nice, certainly, but spectacular? Probably not.
And finally, of course, we have the limitless and often perplexing variety of overhead shapes that form a backdrop to our walks and give texture, balance and contrast to our eagerly-shared photos.
A big wide landscape shot is often so much better with cloud, adding interest to an otherwise featureless sky. Indeed, sometimes the clouds are more impressive than the hills themselves.
I remember one such occasion on Stob Binnein when I was treated to a bizarre display of lenticular clouds.
Generally the product of hills and mountains and often reported as UFOs, these beauties can be seen many tens of miles downwind of the hills that generated them.
These particular ones sailed overhead for the duration of my walk and I spent the whole day looking up into the sky rather than out at the hills. It’s not surprising that cloud–spotting is so popular worldwide and that the study of clouds has a name. Nephology.
I was rash wanting to banish cloud. In fact, the more I think about it, and despite many of the most striking sights being rare and infrequent, I begin to realise just how integral to my enjoyment of the hills cloud-borne phenomena are.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy hillwalking whatever weather I get and I don’t need to see iridescence or spooky apparitions in order to do it. But I can’t deny that those rare moments when I do see something extraordinary and unusual remind me why I return to the hills again and again. To see and experience things I am unlikely to find anywhere else. Ephemeral moments of beauty, stopping me in my tracks, able to wash away the memories of recent bad weather.
Which brings us back to this winter. Does the occasional day of dazzling iridescence negate a whole winter of gloom?
Hmm. Well, I won’t deny I’d love to have had a proper winter season where I could get out & about every week. And I confess that I too pine for those blanket blue days. But I wouldn’t want them all the time.
There is beauty in the gloom, in the murk, in the shafts of light from leaden skies. There’s texture and contrast in our cloudscapes. And as much as I might lament the pre-eminence of one particular type of cloud in Scotland, that big dull wet grey blanket, as far as I’m concerned our hills are all the more beguiling and spectacular for being so susceptible to cloud in all its wonderful guises.
Learn more about cloud types and how to identify them at: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/s/0/12_0674_Factsheet_1_Clouds.pdf
Met Office stats for Winter 2013/14: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2014/early-winter-stats