A response at last from the Rain Gods as summer ends

Country Living with Frances Farragher

A few pangs of guilt filtered through my consciousness over the weekend after enduring some bombarding from the wind and rain that descended on our shores, following on from our glorious September.

Very seldom have I joined the country club who look ‘for a drop of rain’ after five fine days but after reseeding a long lost field in the early days of September, it was obvious enough that the seedlings were thirsting: however, after the weekend gone by, they have now imbibed enough.

It just goes to show that for all our mutterings and complaints about ‘the rain’, the wet stuff really is at the essence of all life and growth. Without it, and the glow of the sun, all our growth and existence would cease to be, so water is the greatest of all fertilisers and nutrients.

Little did I expect though that I would be able to cycle from one end to the other of a newly tilled field in late September without barely a mark on the surface, but such was the way of the world in the Autumn of 2014, and regardless of what comes our way through the months ahead, the Winter has already been shortened.

For a time, September looked like being the driest on record but a dash of rainfall on the final two days of the month, just edged it out of the top two places for that accolade. The late Frank Gaffney’s records showed only 7.1mms. of rainfall (just over a quarter of an inch) fell in September, 1972, while for September, 1986, he had a rainfall of just 7.8mms.

Until the morning of September 29 last, only 1.4mms. had been recorded at the NUI Galway Weather Station, but the final two days ‘did the damage’, bringing the overall figure for the month to still a quite miserly 9.4mms., but alas I’m afraid not good enough to give it the title of the driest ever September in Galway.

Abbeyknockmoy weather recorder, Brendan Geraghty, whose records go back to the early 1960s, had his driest ever September in 1986 with just 0.18 inches of rainfall, followed in second place by the 1972 figure of 0.4 inches and this year 1.1 inches, the vast bulk of that falling in the last two days of the month.

Maybe a bit surprisingly, 2014 has been a wetter year than 2013, but the big factor here has been the very wet January and February we had this year. Brendan Geraghty had rainfall of 7.1 inches in January and 6.61 inches in February, but after that the deluges ended, with May being the wettest month since then, at nearly four inches.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.