Shropshire Magazine

A dramatic skyscape over south Shropshire. Picture: Mike Hayward.

Radio 4’s Fi Glover was cool and authoritative. “And where in the UK is the best place to see clouds?” she inquired. “The Shropshire Hills,” her interviewee responded unhesitatingly.

“You get turbulence and uplift and some lovely little men-shaped clouds that come up over the horizon . . .”

Listening to Saturday Live while giving the kitchen cupboards a bank holiday lick of Farrow and Ball, I nearly dropped my paintbrush in surprise. Could Shropshire really be the best place to go cloud gazing? And do we really have clouds shaped like little men? I was all too easily distracted I’m afraid: left my brush congealing in a jam jar of white spirit and set out in search of Shropshire’s notable cloudscapes.

Fi Glover’s guest that morning was Richard Hamblyn, a geographer, author of The Invention of Clouds (2001) and The Cloud Book (2008) and a cloud expert if ever there was one. With some difficulty, I tracked him down and asked him why he had chosen Shropshire.

“I chose Shropshire in response to Fi Glover’s question on Saturday Live about where to see the best clouds in Britain mainly because of the county’s characteristic hills, allied to the fact that it is inland, so that most of the rain from the heavier clouds has fallen onto Wales before it gets to you!” Richard explained. “The hills provide interesting kinds of uplift, so that moist air rises in local pockets, sometimes forming lenticular clouds downstream from the air current.”

A hare in the air?

A lenticular is a cloud shaped like a flying saucer, and yes, they are sometimes mistaken for UFOs. They are stationary lens- or almond-shaped clouds at high altitude and form when stable moist air is forced upwards (technically known as ‘orographic uplift’) to pass over mountains or hills.

“My favourite image from The Cloud Book, the volume I produced recently on behalf of the Met Office, is of a heart-shaped lenticular over Shropshire,” Richard recalls. “I’ve seen many such clouds hovering over The Wrekin or Wenlock Edge on clear spring afternoons.”

The name lenticular actually comes from the latin lenticularis – shaped like a lentil – but the cloud’s full moniker is actually even more of a chewy mouthful – altocumulus standing lenticularis. The man responsible for naming clouds was Luke Howard, a manufacturing chemist and pharmacist born in London in 1772.

Howard loved nature and the weather – particularly the clouds – from an early age, possibly because of the incredible skies that he must have witnessed in 1783, when he was an impressionable 10 years old. In that year, between May and August, the northern hemisphere sky was laden with a “Great Fogg”, a haze composed of dust and ash from violent volcanic eruptions in Iceland (Laki) and Japan (Asama Yama).

These skies were written about by diarists of the day and novelists even used them as backdrops for their stories, but prior to Howard’s invention of a ‘cloud vocabulary’ they were described largely by their colour, as merely white, black or grey, or more fancifully as red (as in “red sky at night . . .” ) or even “mackerel” skies.

But young Luke Howard decided that colour wasn’t the best way. He realised that clouds fitted into three different groups, each with its own specific characteristics. He called the groups cirrus (meaning ‘curl of hair’), cumulus (‘heap’) and stratus (‘layer’). Later he added a fourth group, nimbus, meaning ‘rain bearing’, and as his classification was refined the terms alto and fracto, meaning middle and broken, were added as well.

Now this handful of latin words describes practically all clouds. Stratocumulus? That’s a layer of lumpy clouds; cirrostratus – a wispy, curly layer of clouds; cumulonimbus – big lumpy clouds that sometimes spread out to make shapes like a blacksmith’s anvil and bring rain, snow or hail, thunder or lightning. Or how about fractostratus – a smooth layer of clouds that looks sort of torn apart?

Howard’s simple system went on to be developed into the International Cloud Atlas, which was abridged in 1896 to leave just the ten types of cloud we still use today:

• low clouds: cumulus, cumulonimbus, stratus and stratocumulus;

• medium clouds: altocumulus, altostratus and nimbostratus;

• high clouds: cirrus, cirrostratus and cirrocumulus.

(Cloud number nine in the atlas is the white, fluffy cumulonimbus, which is where the saying “on cloud nine” comes from, meaning floating free on a comfy cushion without a care in the world.)

Surprisingly, classifying clouds had a major influence on the arts as well as on science. Goethe wrote a series of poems dedicated to Luke Howard, while Shelley’s poem ‘The Cloud’ was inspired by him. Luke’s work even informed that of the artist Constable, who believed that the sky was “the key note, the standard of scale, and the chief organ of sentiment” in a landscape painting.

Today, the same can be said of a landscape photograph – just look at our photographic images of the Shropshire countryside, which reveal the dramatic contribution that clouds make to our local landscapes.

So what about clouds shaped like little men? The Cloud Appreciation Society is a worldwide organisation formed by an eccentric Englishman, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, for people who simply love clouds. It boasts a photo gallery purporting to be of “Clouds that look like things”, but what this actually reveals is that, like the pyschiatrist’s ink blots, what one person sees in clouds isn’t necessarily seen by another.

Clouds over the Clee Hill. Picture: Mike Hayward.

Take our photograph of Titterstone Clee Hill (right), snapped from the ramparts of Nordy Bank hill fort on the Brown Clee Hill, for example. I see a horned devil floating in the top centre of the picture. Or it could be a small child wearing a viking helmet (aka a horned devil). As a parent it is pretty obvious from this what my preoccupations and conflicts are, but what do you see?

Contrary to popular myth, cloud gazing may not just be a form of idleness; the activity may actually be beneficial. “All who consider the shapes they see in them will save on psychoanalysis bills,” claims The Cloud Appreciation Society’s manifesto. “They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.”

What a good excuse. Forget the painting. I think I’ll just go and lie on my back in the grass and contemplate the Heavens.

“I’m a great fan of Salopian skies,” says Richard Hamblyn, knowledgeably.

And so am I.