Musings on Sun, Rain and Mountains

I stepped out of the house yesterday noon into bright sunshine, and it was raining! And freezing: the temperature was only 48° (9°C). I guess our heat wave has ended... It rained two more times today while the sun was shining. Needless to say, the wind was blowing as well. Crazy weather! I guess it's due to Hurricane Philippe in the North Atlantic (but isn't that supposed to bring warm air from the south?).

A friend says there is a saying in Korean for when the sun shines as it rains: "Horangi changga kanun nal". A direct translation says "A day when the tiger gets married", meaning a rare occasion indeed!

Sometimes there is low cloud cover all day in Durham. The clouds sit over the coastal plains but not over the Pennines to the west. (They say the Pennines are mountains, but they look more like the Appalachians than the Rockies...) So there is a wee* gap between the clouds and the hills, and just before sunset, the sun will come out in that gap. The late evening sunshine is exquisite at 10.30 at night in the summer...

The cloud gap over Durham when the sun shines as it sets,
but in winter...

In fact, the Pennines and Appalachians are related: both were formed during the same mountain-building event (the Hercynian orogeny) 240 million years ago, and they have been worn down since then by erosion. At least the Appalachians are covered with trees. Here, the Pennines are mostly agricultural or high moor populated by heather, looking something like tundra (well, look at our latitude!). So they resemble the Rocky Mountains after all, but only above treeline! You can walk straight down the Pennines north to south along the Pennine Way, something like the Appalachian Trail. But don't expect to find any hotels along the path – just high, bleak, rainy moor. It would be like walking the Continental Divide.

*Durham at times was contested by Scotland, another topic