Under the Weather: us and the elements Tom Fort Century, 320pp, £14.99 ISBN 0099461242

If, as Mark Twain said, everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it, is there any point in writing about it? Curiously, Tom Fort doesn't seem sure, but he does it very nicely none the less, as he leads us up hill and down dale in pursuit of the oddities and extremities of the British climate.

Twain's observation was more than just a joke, even at a time when no one had heard of global warming. There have always been people - and they increased vastly in number once the scientific age began - who longed to be more than mere victims of the weather. They got very wet or cold; their roads turned to mud; their crops were ruined; their farm animals starved - Hardy's novels give us a feel for the desperateness of it. For those unable to accept that these were the mysterious ways of the Almighty, it was difficult simply to take it all on the chin.

So what did they do about the weather? They couldn't change it (at least not in any deliberate fashion) but they did manage to explain it in large measure, and they have become quite good at predicting it over short periods. This has been and remains a great human endeavour, and as a cultural study Under the Weather makes its own small but valuable contribution.

Not that Tom Fort sees it that way. Perhaps because he is already the author of books about eels and lawns, he is prone to an apologetic tone, holding up his hands every now and then, and saying: "OK I'm a geek, but at least I know it." He writes lovingly, for example, about barometers - their mechanisms, their history, their styles - and reveals himself a true enthusiast, a regular tapper of the glass, but he seems to accept the view that it is all meaningless, an exercise for sad men.

The same ambivalence infects his view of the weather diarists and the rain-gauge men of history. We meet, among others, William Merle, the 14th-century rector of Driby, who loyally recorded the Lincolnshire weather from day to day for seven years. Now it is true, as Fort says, that the entries themselves make dull reading and are pretty well useless, and it may even be the case that Merle was not the most exciting dinner companion the Middle Ages had to offer, but that is hardly the point. He was a pioneer, a hero. But for him and his ilk, we would still be mere victims of the cold and wet, the heat and drought.

Fort is best when he lets go and indulges, especially on the road. Take his trip to Culbin on the Moray Firth: who would have thought that in Britain a sandstorm could have destroyed a whole community? Yet according to folklore, that is what happened there in 1694. Culbin was a prosperous community of people who tended the "garden and granary" of Moray until a sudden storm carried a drift of sand "like a mighty river" over their land, swamping all in its path, killing the town forever and leaving only desert behind.

As Fort tramps the sandy ground (now forested), he explains that modern research tells a slightly less dramatic tale of gradual encroachment by sand over months, even years. And Culbin, for that matter, wasn't quite the fertile Eden of legend; indeed, it was scarcely more than a hamlet. Writers down the years have not been able to resist giving their tale the Hollywood treatment. Yet the wonder remains: desertification in Scotland!

Weston-super-Mare, too, earns a visit. Fort is not the first writer to survey that sheet of mud which seems to stretch all the way to Wales and wonder what on earth possessed hard-working Victorians to pass their meagre holidays there. He at least has an answer: a unique local cocktail of wind, sea air and, yes, the effusions off all that mud were once thought to work wonders on the lungs. There are many more vignettes, from the leech-powered forecasting machine of Whitby to the modern-day Merle of Halesowen, and from the tragic Robert Fitzroy (now immortalised as a Sea Area) to the quasi-Nazi Ellsworth Huntingdon, who preached that white men were best because they had the best weather.

Fort is an amiable and fluent guide, and should feel less embarrassment about his contribution to weather lore. Certainly there is geekiness here, a male-bonding obsessiveness, but we should remind ourselves that weather enthusiasm is different from, say, train-spotting in an important way. Trains have a human Fat Controller who directs their movements in a perfectly knowable manner; the weather, by contrast, is above us and often beyond us, and we can only understand it by keeping it under observation in whatever ways we can contrive.

Brian Cathcart is the author of Rain (Granta Books)

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