We seem to have lost a month, August feels like September, the parched landscape offering up an early feast of wild berries ready to feast on, and harvested barley bales dot-dot-dashing across the fields.
In years to come, we’ll be saying “oh it’s never as hot as ’18” in reference to the benchmark that once beat all heatwave benchmarks – the summer of ’76. Even that infamous summer heatwave has been trounced. I am used to the looks of pity, once I confess to not having shared this great cultural experience.
Records Tumble
Well, this year has really strained those weather conversations to the absolute limit. We’ve had the icy ‘beast from the east’ and are just stumbling and sweating our way through the hottest summer. Ever. Scorched earth is the new summer look; shades of brown, yellow, dead (apart from the weeds), hard baked, cracked earth. Whatever happened to those green fields that visitors flock from all the world to admire? Did they imagine the Chiltern prairies as their planes touched down at the start of their English country holiday?
We don’t show off our best side in the heat, and the national obsession has been taken to new levels; replacing the low-level grumbling that ‘it’s too wet, not wet enough, too cold, spring is too early, too late, there’s been no spring, and it’s definitely far too hot’….you get the gist.
Across the northern hemisphere, people and the land have been baking in this prolonged and extreme 2018 summer season. Minds far greater than mine will be calculating if this is what climate change looks like, with temperature extremes that bring wild fires, drought, storms, infrastructure pressures and failures, even death.
The effect on the parched landscape has been dramatic. Some rivers and chalk streams have continued to flow following the long wet winter, but enough impact that has seen Crestyl Watercress farm at Sarratt closed since early June for over two months. Even the duckpond at Albury is bone dry.
The seasonal wildflowers came and went through their spring and summer palette far too quickly, with Queen Anne’s lace left to pretty much carry the can, while the rest finished up and went home early. None of those hardy slugs either, such a summer feature that do a sterling job cleaning up the countryside (and each other), are nowhere to be seen.
An early bounty
We seem to have lost a month, August feels like September, the parched landscape offering up wild berries ready to pick, and the barley bales dot-dot-dashing across the fields. In the past few weeks the emergence of the end of summer berry-bounty that festoons the hedgerows and along the pathways with blackberries, sloes, hawthorn, rose hips and elderberries ripe for picking. The blackberries are lovely, although a bit undersized. I’ll cope.
2018 really is the summer that just keeps on giving…but I suspect we would secretly prefer those middling damp summers, green countryside and wet picnics, that means we can gently moan that a few days of summer sunshine wouldn’t go amiss!
What will the autumn have in store?
Further Information
For further inspiration on what to see and do in the naturally outstanding Chilterns or to read more summer tales, plus the wonderful story ‘A Reason to Love the Rain, which tells of what some wet weather really can do.
The Chilterns 