It seems fitting that, 250 years ago, one of Scotland’s foremost scientists took a close interest in what is arguably the country’s most famous feature: rain
James Hutton, celebrated by Scots as the father of modern geology, went so far as to write a formula for “a theory of rain”. In 1784, he sketched out the key principles for the “condensation of aqueous vapour contained in the air”.
Now, Hutton’s calculations are to take centre stage in an exhibition celebrating rain at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. Between 100bn and 160bn cubic metres of rain fall on Scotland each year.
The library has drawn on two of the country’s great literary heroes – Minnie the Minx and Robert Burns – pairing them with tartan samples of the rainproof Mackintosh fabric invented by the Glasgow-born chemist Charles Macintosh in 1823.
Alongside copies of the Beano – including a cartoon strip featuring Minnie and the Met Office educating children about the dangers of storms – the National Library of Scotland is showing a rare original copy of Daemonologie, the treatise on witches and the supernatural by King James VI of Scotland and I of England and Wales.
Written in 1597 against a backdrop of violent persecution of alleged sorcerers and witches, the text blames them for conjuring months of storms that delayed the boat carrying his new queen Anne of Denmark from arriving in Scotland. “They can raise stormes and tempests in the aire, either upon sea or land,” the king wrote.
Daemonologie is credited with inspiring the witches who opened William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which also features in the exhibition, alongside the rain that drenches Burns’s antihero Tam O’Shanter as he flees a storm and a “hellish legion” of demons.
Alison Stevenson, the library’s director of collections, said the institution’s exhibitions were usually biographical or historical, but this display broke with those confines.
“Rain is in our manuscripts, our maps, poetry, prose, vast newspaper collections, films – you name it. Rain is such an intrinsic part of life in Scotland. We have a relationship with rain whether we want to have one or not,” she said. “We talk about it, dress for it, measure it, write about it, avoid it, worry about it, sing about it. This exhibition covers all perspectives.”
Happily for tourists dashing in to escape a summer shower, the exhibition is in a room only a few steps from the library’s front door. Inside, visitors can study early rain maps of Scotland, brought in from the library’s renowned cartographic collection, including one from 1912 charting 25 years of rain. Many may be surprised to learn that, despite the rain that drenches western and northern Scotland, Edinburgh is one of the drier cities in the UK – Rome gets more rain annually.
The exhibition also includes a weather forecast wall, where visitors can play TV meteorologist on a vast chart using pre-digital detachable rain, cloud and sun symbols. Heather Reid, one of Scotland’s best-known forecasters, is opening the exhibition on 17 June. She is best known to BBC Scotland viewers as Heather the Weather.
The exhibits range from the “angler poet” Thomas Tod Stoddart bemoaning the impact of a drought on the Tweed fishery in 1864 to the diarist Mary Cumming Bruce noting, with sketches, how in 1889 a rain-soaked boy stared at her for carrying an umbrella – then a fashionable symbol of wealth.
Rain’s capacity for endangering lives has more recent resonance for the library. In early 2023, its preventive conservator, Mel Houston, was killed in a flash flood in the Borders.
She had played “a pivotal role in making sure our buildings and collections will withstand rising temperatures and water levels caused by climate change”, the library said. The exhibition will be dedicated to her memory.
