Summer Heatwave: Old Moore may have predicted a scorcher (mixed with storms) this summer. But that’s not the only way the Irish know what weather is coming.
St Swithin was a 9th-century Bishop of Winchester. He asked to be buried outside, in the simple churchyard, rather than in a grand shrine. Monks later decided to move his remains inside to a more honourable spot. On the day they tried (15 July, around 971), it apparently poured with rain for 40 days straight, as if the saint was expressing displeasure.
This produced the enduring rhyme:
St Swithin’s Day, if thou dost rain, / For forty days it will remain; / St Swithin’s Day, if thou be fair, / For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.
So the folklore is essentially a weather-prediction rule: whatever the weather does on 15 July, it’ll supposedly continue for 40 days. It’s mostly an English tradition, but it crops up in Irish weather lore too.
It is a good yarn, and the Irish did pick it up over the centuries, but Ireland never needed to borrow a saint to read the weather. Long before anyone had heard of Swithin, Irish communities had their own, far richer system for predicting whether a heatwave was coming or whether the summer was about to wash out entirely.
Summer Heatwave? The real marker day: Garland Sunday
Rather than a single rainy bishop, the Irish calendar had its own run of “marker days” used to forecast the season ahead. The one that falls right in the thick of summer is Garland Sunday, also known as Reek Sunday, the last Sunday in July. It is the day thousands still climb Croagh Patrick in County Mayo. The old belief held that the weather on this day was a signal for what was to follow.
Cold, wet conditions on Garland Sunday were taken as a forecast of things to come.
It was one of several such days dotted through the Irish year. Candlemas in early February, St Brigid’s Day, the so-called Borrowed Days in April, and the Assumption on 15 August (expected to bring fine weather) all played a part in an old, informal forecasting calendar long before Met Éireann existed.
Reading the animals
Where the Irish system really comes into its own is in its attention to the natural world. Long before barometers, people watched the behaviour of birds, animals, and even the hearth fire for clues:
- A robin sheltering under a bush in the morning was a sign of rain on the way; one sitting high in a tree meant fine weather was coming.
- Herons flying upstream towards the mountains signalled dry but rough weather, while flying downstream meant rain.
- Oystercatchers crying was taken as a sign of wet, windy conditions.
- A ring around the moon meant a storm was brewing, the closer the ring, the nearer the rain.
- Indoors, a cat turning its back to the fire, or smoke from the chimney drifting downward instead of rising straight up, were both read as warnings of bad weather to come.
These sayings were not idle superstition. They were collected from farmers, fishermen, and shepherds, whose livelihoods depended on getting it right, and many were recorded by schoolchildren in the 1930s as part of the National Folklore Collection, now one of the largest archives of oral tradition in western Europe.
Summer Heatwave: So, will it be a scorcher?
Whether you trust a robin under a bush more than a satellite forecast is up to you, but the old lore and the modern science actually agree on one thing: Irish weather has always been changeable, and any forecast, ancient or digital, is hard to make. St Swithin might get the headlines every July, but it was Garland Sunday, a watchful robin, and a ring around the moon that the Irish actually relied on.
