legends · 3 min read ·
Rain Gauge
A farmer's rain gauge fills on dry days with something that sets like jelly.
**Diary of Tom Ashby, Low Beck Farm. Rainfall recorded 9 a.m. daily from the copper gauge on the wall by the dairy door. My father kept the same record from 1951.**
**1 Oct.** Dry. 0.0 mm.
**2 Oct.** Showers. 4.2 mm. Gauge emptied.
**3 Oct.** Dry. 0.0. Gauge dry as a bone.
**4 Oct.** Rain from first light. 11.0 mm. The beck is up. Gauge emptied.
**5 Oct.** Dry.
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**7 Oct.** Clear sky from dawn. Dry all day. The washing out by eight and dry by noon. When I went to the gauge at nine I found it nearly full. 9.4 mm. Water, clear. I thought a pail of the dairy washdown had been thrown over the wall. I emptied it and said nothing.
**8 Oct.** Dry. Gauge: 12.1 mm. Cold water to the brim. I wiped the funnel. There is nothing on the funnel that would explain it.
**9 Oct.** Dry. Gauge: 15 mm.
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**11 Oct.** Heavy rain over the whole dale. Neighbours' gauges were over 20 mm. Mine was empty. I stood at the dairy door at nine o'clock with the rain running off my cap and looked into the tube, and the tube was dry. It had not rained into it. The wall beneath the gauge was dry in a clean strip under the eaves, the width of the gauge, and the stone was warm.
**12 Oct.** Dry in the dale. In the gauge, 18 mm. The water was not clear.
I mean it was colourless, but when I held the tube to the light there was a fine haze in it, a drift, like a drop of milk in a glass. I did not taste it. I tipped it onto the cobbles. It did not run. It spread out into a round pool, a hand's width, and stayed.
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**14 Oct.** Dry. 26 mm. The water in the gauge is cloudy and heavier than water has any right to be. It does not slosh. It moves when I tilt the tube, slowly, as a pudding does. I measured it. 26 mm in the glass cylinder, but when I put my finger in to feel the depth it went in further than the scale. There is more in the tube than the tube can hold.
I have put a bucket under the gauge. I do not know why.
**16 Oct.** Dry. Gauge over the brim. Bucket half full. The stuff in the bucket has begun to set at the edges like a jelly.
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**20 Oct.** Dry. The bucket is full. I have put out a second one. Neither the sheepdog nor the cat will go near the dairy yard. The ewes in the home field have turned their backs on it. I have seen the line of sheep, thirty of them, all at the far wall, and all their heads are down and the wind is carrying their breath away from the yard.
I took a spoon to the bucket this morning. I do not know what I thought I would find. It was warm. I drew the spoon through it and left a furrow that did not close.
**22 Oct.** Rain over the fells at last. Nothing here. The gauge: dry. Both buckets: dry, scrubbed, the insides smooth as glass. Not a mark of what had been in them.
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**24 Oct.** Dry. I have not been to the gauge for two days. This morning I found the tube lying on the cobbles, below the wall, where it must have been thrown. The bracket is empty. The screws are in a neat row on the step.
On the dairy wall, at the height where the gauge was, someone has chalked a mark. A small clean circle, drawn with a steady hand. Beside it, in my father's writing, which I would know anywhere, one line.
*Full. Emptied 9 a.m.*
The wall is dry. The sky is clear. Nothing has fallen here for three weeks, and every morning I go out at nine and the chalk circle is wet.