Rain: Four Walks in English Weather by Melissa Harrison: book review

Rain: Four Walks in English Weather (2016) is about four walks in 2014 in four different rainy locations in England: Wicken Fen, Shropshire, Darent Valley, and Dartmoor. The author calls it ‘My year of getting wet.’

It begins with the premise, a quote from Albert Wainwright: ‘There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.’ And so, appropriately attired, the author steps out … in the rain. Usually with a partner – either a half-terrier dog called Scout or her husband Anthony that form the ‘we’ of her walk.

The Wicken Fen walk is in Jauary 2014 – the wettest January in 250 years. The area is waterlogged peat lowlands. Worms come to the surface. In Shropshire in April, the weather is changeable. It is a good month for leverets (baby hares) and the Comma butterflies. In Darent Valley in August, thunderstorms burst onto the rolling farmlands. The walk in Dartmoor in October is accompanied by mizzle – fine, misty rain that combines both mist and drizzle.

Melissa Harrison brings all of her senses with her, as she describes not only the weather, but also the flora and fauna, the feelings, the changing landscape and the memory it evokes of her childhood, life events, poems, and proverbs. Meteorological facts are interspersed between the delightful descriptions of her walks.

I like the glossary at the end of the book on the 100 British words for rain! And the more scientific glossary of meteorological terms for rain.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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