I was surprised to see the Met Office forecasting in mid-December that 2026 was likely to be one of the hottest years yet (since their records began – in the mid-1800’s).
After the exceptionally sunny, if cold, Christmas we enjoyed, January has begun with significant snowfall. And temperatures to minus 11, or lower, if my digital surface temperature thermometer is still accurate. And enough wonderful light to produce a month’s worth of striking images in just a few days.
Writing about snow soon becomes challenging, as indeed does coping with its impacts. Probably seeing lots of snowy images isn’t that exciting either. But days like this in our part of the world aren’t that common, and the sequence of events created very special scenes and experiences for me to record. Will we ever see the like again?
We knew from the forecasts that a wintry spell was on the way, and it began for us with multiple sleet and hail showers on Friday night and Saturday (2/3rd), which gradually accumulated to give a light covering of the ground, and indeed our sheep when we walked down to feed them.
Their fleeces are such excellent insulation that after one frosty night without any precipitation, they were even glinting with frost crystals on the tips of the wool, at feeding time.
However, none of our forecasts predicted more than 5 cm of snow overnight on the Saturday. I’d managed to film the nearly full Wolf Moon rising above the hills and trees due East at dusk, just before a snow flurry from the North blotted it out. Seizing the opportunity enabled me to turn this into the short YouTube below. For sound, I used Tawny Owl hoots, recorded on still nights in November and December, when they’re often at their noisiest just after dark. They rarely hoot for long enough to provide gripping background sound effects, but by overlapping them, it’s a little more impressive. There are certainly a few sequences included where at least 3 owls were involved, with some very close to the back door where I was recording.
I’m also going to include a YouTube compilation of all the ice vases and ice spikes I’ve ever seen up here – it turns out to be a dozen, in the 13 years since I saw the first. And ended with another quite significant spike discovered on December 30th.
For anyone new to ice spikes, I’ve written about how they come to be formed in a couple of posts, here and here. I thought a YouTube compilation might be enlightening since there seem to be very few online records of series of natural ice vases/spikes, currently available. Which may imply that our weather conditions locally – humidity, altitude, rainfall are particularly favourable for them to form. However, finding just 12 in 13 years hardly makes them common phenomena, which is why I always get a buzz from seeing one. If you watch this, you’ll note that they’re very variable in form, size, and even where they’ve developed.
Returning to the main theme of this post, we weren’t expecting to wake to such a blanket covering of snow on Sunday morning, or indeed such a wonderful sunrise, which saw us both outside checking depths of snow, (roughly 20cms in the fields) and taking photos.
I always try to remove any snow, hail or ice from the PV panels early in the day, lest it melts, freezes, then more snow builds on top, and the task becomes really difficult. Saturday morning’s efforts were indeed like this, taking a good 40 minutes to shift all the melted, then refrozen, hail-based ice.
Sunday was much easier – it was lovely soft snow, and with that completed, we headed down through the fields to top up the hay in the ewe’s home made feeder.
By now, the clouds had cleared and we had the most wonderful intense blue sky. And realised that the lack of wind meant that there was no drifting, so the fields had a uniformly deep layer. In addition, the tiniest terminal twigs on all the trees were etched in a significant snowy topping, as well as the northern aspect of all the trunks. It was remarkably beautiful, if chilly, and neither of us could recall quite such special scenes, though this might in part be because many of the trees, particularly the group of birch, have grown significantly in recent years.
Walking down and back through this thick, soft snow over the icy hail base layer was both tiring and very noisy. Neither of us remembered such noisy snow before either, and I asked Fiona how she’d describe the sound – it didn’t seem as harsh as crunching. She came up with ‘crumping’, which seemed to capture the slightly softer middle element to the sound, after our boots had moved through the upper snow layers with each step. Back inside the warmth of the house I did a bit of googling, and was delighted to find that the 18th century country poet John Clare had coined, or certainly used, exactly this onomatopoeic word in a few of his winter poems to describe the sound of walking through snow. Of course Clare lived at the end of the lengthy ‘Little Ice Age’ period of historically lower temperatures which affected Britain for hundreds of years, and ended in about 1850 – intriguingly about the same time Met Office began to accumulate their records of worryingly rising temperatures.
As an example from a verse from ‘Christmas’:
Neighbours resume their annual cheer
Wishing wi’ smiles and spirits high
Clad Christmass and a happy year
To every morning passer bye
Milk maids their Christmass journeys go
Accompanyd wi’ favourd swain
And children pace the crumping snow
To taste their granny’s cake again.
Apart from these novel sounds and the obliteration of most colour from the garden and landscape, the main feature for the two days after the heaviest snowfall was the nearly complete silence. And also how nothing beats snow for pristine whiteness – apart from snowdrop flowers. The sheep suddenly seemed to be a dirty off-white. The limewashed walls of the house suddenly didn’t seem white at all, but patchy off-white with green tinges.
As for silence after significant snowfalls, it’s a multifactorial phenomenon. Partly because almost all human activity ceases in a rural landscape like this after such heavy snow. Yet even birds and other animals hunker down. It was a good 36 hours before we noticed any animal prints on the deep snow in the fields. In addition, recent snowfall is typically very porous, containing many tiny air spaces. This makes fresh deep snow excellent at absorbing any sound in the environment. Even the latches on our metal 5 bar gates stopped clanging on opening for the first 2 days after the heavy snowfall. As the snow compacts, melts, then freezes, its porosity is lost and it can even become a more sound reflecting, and non-absorbing acoustic environment.
Having trudged up to the hut through the deep snow, mid-afternoon on Monday, and after yet more snow had fallen overnight, the peace was extraordinary. I sat and simply absorbed it for many minutes, trying to hear anything. 
Eventually, I opened the Thought Box, pulled out the Bee Wild book and began to write a few lines, to try to capture these precious moments, and describe the scene. I’d just written a line about disturbing a heron from the pond near the birch trees, the day before, when I looked up and spotted a heron flying up from the South. Really high in the sky, I tracked it lower, as it descended to a tall pine on the far side of the stream. We hadn’t seen a heron for 10 days or so before these sightings, and guess that like many birds and animals, finding food during such a cold snap becomes a real challenge.
One of the delights of the garden during these snowy days has been different views of the yew hedge windows, or ‘viaduct’. Fortunately, 25 years after planting, it seems to have become dense enough to resist the weight of the snow on top, and simply become snow-capped, like a wall would, with no damaging splaying out of individual stems.
As much of the snow finally began to melt on Wednesday, the Met Office began ramping up warnings of more serious snowfall and strong winds due to arrive within 36 hours from named Storm Goretti. If it’s as dramatic as they’re suggesting, with winds as strong, we could well be in for a very challenging time. Word has it that there’s been panic buying of food in the local stores. Let’s just hope that it isn’t that bad, and we don’t have more days of shovelling and scraping ahead.
For some appropriate musical links to end this wintry post, here are a couple of new discoveries I’ve made.
The first is a beautiful contemporary piece composed in 2021 and performed by a Canadian flute/harp duo (Topaz Duo – Kaili Maimets, flute; Angela Schwarzkopf, harp). Composed by the Canadian pianist composer Kevin Lau, it’s based upon a short story Lau had imagined and completed in 2020, which he describes thus in his programme notes for the piece’s inaugural performance, which was recorded on the musician’s first album, available to listen here – ‘Lumena’
“It’s about parrot (Nyx) who is adopted by a Chinese-Greek couple named Arthur and Maria. Facing difficulties in conceiving, the couple raises Nyx lovingly, training her to fetch food from the nearby Chinese restaurant Little Feng Huang (which means Little Phoenix.) At the story’s conclusion, as Arthur and Maria receive the unexpected news of Maria’s pregnancy with elation, Nyx — who has been ill — flies out the window and is consumed by flames, transforming into the phoenix of both Chinese and Greek myth, and bringing with it the promise of new life.”
This second movement, titled “Winter is a World of White”, describes Nyx’s wide eyed innocence — as well as her longing to venture beyond the confines of her home and explore the world ‘Outside.’ I think the music captures this perfectly, and indeed is appropriate for the sense of purity and innocence that any silent snowy landscape can also elicit.
The second piece is the winter ‘season’ from Glazunov’s score for a Russian ballet, ‘Les Saisons – The Seasons’ choreographed by Marius Petipa. The music was originally due to be composed by the Italian composer and conductor Riccardo Drigo, who was Glazunov’s colleague and close friend. Around the same time, Petipa had handed Glazunov a separate ballet, ‘Les Millions d’Arlequin’, to compose a score for. However, both composers preferred the other’s subjects/themes, so Glazunov composed ‘Les Saisons’, whilst Drigo tackled ‘Les Millions’. Both were premiered within 3 days of each other in February 1900.The opening tableau of the four seasons represents winter – with themes for winter surrounded by its companions: hoar-frost, ice, hail and snow. It was premiered in St. Petersburg on February 13th 1900. Here performed by Edo de Waart conducting the· Minnesota Orchestra
Today, Thursday, I’m rushing to get this finished before Goretti swirls around, and all manner of dire fates might await us. Or not. It’s actually quite fun watching the Met Office presenter, Alex Burkill, enjoying himself greatly with the detailed computer model driven graphics explaining the “multi-hazard event” which this latest low pressure system represents, to the cowering public.
I wonder what on earth the current Met Office would have made of the observation that author Nicholas Crane made many years ago. I wrote about this only 8 years ago in 2018, when we had a very severe wintry spell – without any of these dire computer modelled warnings. I re-discovered it whilst hunting down previous ice spikes, and it’s worth looking at just how dramatic (though different to the photos published today) my photos were from that post published on March 1st 2018:
“In (that-sic) January I’d begun reading “The Making of The British Landscape” by Nicholas Crane. I’d been amazed by his description of how Britain would have looked just 12,000 years ago. Glaciers filled the Great Glen in Scotland to a depth of 600 metres. Average winter mean temperatures were minus 17 degrees C. Just 9,700 years ago, in the space of perhaps 50 years, average July temperatures leapt by 7 degrees C. The climate warmed. Britain became, once more, inhabitable.”
I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard this dramatic 7 degrees C rise in just 50 years mentioned anywhere in MSM over the last many years. And all achieved as natural ‘climate change’ well pre-any industrialisation or widespread fossil fuel use.
I wanted to finish by referencing how much the scene outside has changed in just 24 hours. Much of the snow has melted from the fields leaving perhaps just 2 to 3 cms. It’s now wet and slippery. Walking is less effort, and the gates now clang again. A few birds can be heard singing – wood pigeons and blue tits. A blackbird enjoyed a bath in the almost ice-clear bird bath which was submerged beneath snow for several days. Molehills are appearing once more, highlighting the 3 different soil types within just 15 yards at the entry to our lower wet hay meadow – shaley-rich umber, then grey brown, then black, as one hits the valley bottom peat seam.
And the sound of slide walking down hill? Gone is the effort of ‘crumping‘. Replaced by what? I’d say it was a softer almost whispered, ‘schwelping’ – no element of crispness or crunch, but still a faint hint of an ‘mping’ as the boot finally hits the lowest level of ice/snow. Neither of these words really sit well in the English language though.
The Swedes clearly have many more opportunities than us to reflect on the diversity of snow types, and have a suitably expressive language to capture these differences. Here are a few favourites from the 50 which Neil Shipley listed on his blog post in 2018:
Blötsnö – wet, slushy snow
Hårdsnö – compacted hard snow
Kramsnö – squeezy snow, perfect for making snowballs
Nysnö – fresh snow, crisp and white
Slask – slushy snow mixed with rain and dirt on the ground
Snörök – faint particles of snow that look like smoke
Flingsnö – snow with larger crystals
Pärlsnö – snow like small pearls that hurts when it hits your face
Snöglopp – wet snow mixed with rain
Fjöcksnö – a light, fluffy snow
Knarrsnö – crispy snow that creaks when you walk on it.
However, you’ll see that these aren’t actually words about the sound differences of walking on snow. Just words to describe observed physical difference in snow.
But perhaps I’m missing the whole point here.
The Swedish poet and Nobel Laureate, Tomas Tranströmer was fortunate to have his wife Monica able to read this poem he’d written, at the 2011 Nobel Prize banquet – he finally won the award after 18 consecutive years of being nominated.
“Tired of all who come with words, words but no language
l went to the snow-covered island.
The wild does not have words.
The unwritten pages spread out on all sides!
I come upon the tracks of roe deer in the snow.
Language but no words.”
To discover more about how it was that his wife had to read this poem for him, click here for a most moving tribute and insight about this remarkable writer, by Celia Farber in Lapham’s Quarterly.
Perhaps I need to read a little more, and write a little less.