October coloured weather was pleasing to the senses

Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m probably never going to make a living as a chimney sweep based on my two forays each Autumn and Spring onto the roof of the bungalow to run the brushes down the flues, a task that seems to engender fears in some quarters of a kitchen black-out, based on a rather disastrous DIY CV.

The chimney sweeps rose to stardom back in the mid-1960s with the Mary Poppins musical featuring the famous Chim Chim Cher-ee song, extolling the glorious virtue of skipping along the London rooftops as they merrily left the chimney vents in a pristine condition after them.

One thing that my biannual rooftop tour provides is an overview of the countryside and last Saturday, with November’s Day just hours away, the lush greenness of the local landscape took some beating for this time of year. A swathe of North Galway countryside from Knockroe Hill to Barnaderg and Corofin was as green as it was last July, and it’s all thanks to a particularly benign October that brought us higher than average temperatures and rainfall amounts of just over two inches.

Another consequence of our Indian Summer through the course of last month has been the hum of lawnmowers in the early days of the year’s 11th month, when the cutting machines might well have expected to be enjoying their annual winter hibernation.

Met Éireann’s weather report for October reflects the good feeling we got from the month with some really pleasant periods of low autumnal sunshine and a temperature high of 19.1° Celsius recorded at Oak Park in Carlow.

However on Sunday last, November 1, that high was well and truly beaten at Dooks in Kerry, where an Irish record November temperature of 20.1° Celsius was recorded. An area of high pressure, fuelled by a gentle southerly breezes of Tropical origin, gave us a most pleasant weekend of weather.

All of Met Éireann’s weather stations across the country had lower than normal rainfall levels, with just 39.4mms (well below two inches) recorded at Casement Aerodrome in Dublin. More locally, Abbeyknockmoy ‘weather man’ Brendan Geraghty, collected just 2.26 inches of rain in his gauge over the course of the month, with all of that falling in nine days, giving us 22 completely dry days.

That 2.26 inch figure for mid-Galway compared to almost seven inches in July and 5.38 inches in August. September though – despite one horribly wet weekend on the 10th and 11th – was also a pretty decent month with just under 3.5 inches of rainfall. So in the great scheme of things our year is falling into the ‘pretty okay’ category with last April and June also being very dry months.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.