CLOUDS OVER GLASGOW





Then, what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?
I love clouds... drifting clouds... there.... over there...
marvellous clouds.

Charles Baudelaire

On a cold quiet day in March, a Rorschachian moment with some fair-weather cumulus humilis. From atop one of Glasgow's great vantage points - Mugdock reservoir in Milngavie - one can almost see forever.

(Top) The cumulonimbus, that great feature of a Glasgow sky, makes itself known from the top of Peel Glen Road, Drumchapel, at the site of what used to be the old Roman fort, looking north towards Windyhill.

Hills and clouds go hand in hand. Nephologically speaking, Glasgow's skyscape, privy to the movements of an Atlantic front and to the static contours of an undulating landscape, is pretty exciting.

With a little due attention we can learn a lot from watching the sky. Sadly though, few of us actually do it. John Ruskin, a man whose word-paintings of cloud-filled days occupy large swathes of his journals, speaks freely of clouds in his epic Modern Painters, especially in the chapter Of the Open Sky:

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of all creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more, for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works, and it is just the part in which we least attend to her.

Look up, look down, look all around. The world is everywhere.

Some wispy cirrus, a good example of a mackerel sky, above the Kilpatrick Braes.

CLOUDS

Clouds

they hang in the air

like whole countries

there before me

an unwritten atlas of the skies

Stratus - Cirrus - Cumulus

continents floating

on oceans of air

An enormous cumulonimbus still forming over Loch Lomond. From afar, these giant beauties appear quite calm and gentle. Being under one is another story entirely.

From atop Cochno Hill some altocumulus floccus over Glasgow.

Looking west from Lawers Tower, Knightswood, a curtain (shelf cloud) cumulonimbus draws over the day, but not before some crepuscular rays can perform some kind of diurnal swan song.

Greenside Reservoir. The crisp well-defined head on this cumulus congestus shows that it is still very much in the process of forming. These clouds grow rapidly on sunit days with the upward convection of warm air.