Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Whinmoor ·
The Barn of the Second Weather
The hay ledgers of Whinmoor book a drying weather that no instrument at the station hut has ever once confirmed, and the hay is drier for it.
- filed: "before the threshing returns"
- reference: "WM/BS/07"
1. This file concerns the two records kept against each other on the high ground at Whinmoor: the hay ledgers of the Fell farm, tenanted by W. Ollerenshaw, and the barometric day-book of the station hut below the old quarries. The records have been kept side by side since before the hut was wired for light. They do not agree. The disagreement recurs at fixed intervals of the hay year, which is the whole of the difficulty and the reason the matter has come to this office.
2. Hay is cut on the fell once a season, in one cycle: mown, turned, dried, baled, and carted down before the sky can change its mind. The ledgers enter each drying spell as a weather, with dates, turns of the windrow, and hours made good. For as far back as the ledgers run — and the oldest of them predates every other book the parish keeps — every cycle carries two such entries, ruled and headed First Weather and Second Weather in the same iron-gall ink. The station confirms the first weather to the hour and to the wind. The station has never once confirmed the second.
3. Each second weather was set against the hut's day-book for four cycles in succession, the sheets fetched out and read at the desk in the hut itself. On every date of every second weather the hut shows rain falling, or the barometer standing dead level with no fall entered, or the anemometer stopped overnight and set going again by the morning. The keeper's hand is even; his times are kept to the minute; his checks against the sea-gauge at Murrow are regular and countersigned. There is no looseness anywhere in his record to lean an excuse against, and the office looked, and did not find it, and looked again.
4. The hay, meanwhile, tells the ledgers' story rather than the hut's. Moisture tests taken before a second weather and taken after it fall by almost exactly the margin proper to some thirty hours of drying, and the windrows in the barn books match the turnings claimed of them turn for turn. The twine ledger shows baling consumption consistent with hay dried twice. Bales out of second-weather cycles go into the pits drier than any settled spell the station would allow, and come out of them sweet. The Whinmoor hay is spoken for in the auction ring before the second weather is over. Nobody at the ring treats any of this as a matter calling for comment.
5. The tenant was asked when the second weather begins. He said you get two weathers or you get none, and you book both, and you bale when the thistledown flies. Asked whether a second weather had ever been missed when it was looked for, he moved the lamp nearer the ledger and said the ruling was his grandfather's and he saw no reason to alter it. Asked where the second weather came from, he closed the book. The ledgers for the three seasons the hut stood unkept carry the second weather plainly, entered in just the same fashion, with no keeper in the hut to contradict them.
6. The last keeper to sit out a full season's hay, A. Duncalf, left a private notebook shelved behind the instrument boxes. Its final written page sets his own readings beside the farm's book for two cycles, tally against tally, reckoning against reckoning, and closes, in a smaller hand: second weather again. wind at the wrong door. The hut is now held by a keeper sent up from Murrow, who has signed for the instruments and who had not, at the time of this filing, opened the notebook.
7. No Writ arises on this file. The Cantor directs that the inquiry rest as found. It is noted, however, that the present cycle's Second Weather already stands in the farm's ledger: ruled, headed, and dated, with the dates falling in the week after this filing, and the hours column ruled out and empty against them. Someone rules that column to its depth each season well enough in advance to make room for a number of hours, and is never a half-hour over. This office has not asked how. The threshing returns will come in when they come in. They will either make the column good or make the file worth reopening, and until they do the question stays where the ledger leaves it: dated, ruled, and open.