The woman who documented the weather every day for thirty-seven years

Why did Janet Burnet of Kemnay House in Aberdeenshire, north-east Scotland, meticulously record the weather almost every day from 1758 to 1795?

James Fox

8/21/20246 min read

August 1st 1795

Still more Rain – from this to the 6 warmer weather then any we have had this year – But Every day Some Rain – very Bad for the New Cut Hay – from this to the 11 Every day Showrs of Rain

So reads the final entry in the diary of Janet Burnet (c.1718–1802), the lady of Kemnay House near Inverurie, Aberdeenshire. Then aged seventy-seven, Janet had been describing the often bleak Aberdeenshire weather on a regular basis and in considerable detail in her diary for the past thirty-seven years.

Kemnay House near Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, where Janet lived from around 1750.
Kemnay House near Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, where Janet lived from around 1750.

Kemnay House near Inverurie, Aberdeenshire, where Janet lived from around 1750.

It’s no secret that British people love to talk about the weather: its (un)predictable changes, the impact it has on moods, daily activities, and of course the very real changes in the global climate that it reflects. Weather is the subject of small talk and headline news alike.

In the past too, the nature and impact of the weather were forms of knowledge regularly sought and discussed. The working lives of many people, such as farmers and fisherfolk, depended on certain conditions, but the weather also seems to have been a topic of interest in its own right.

The well-known diary of seventeenth-century English Puritan minister Ralph Josselin, for example, exhibits his keen interest in recording weather. Other less heralded journals of the period were devoted specifically to recording the weather, like that of Sir John Wittewronge of Rothamsted, Hertfordshire, which spans the years 1684 to 1689, or Margaret Mackenzie of Delvine, Perthshire, kept from 1780 to 1805.

The period from the fourteenth to the mid-nineteenth century is often known as the ‘Little Ice Age’ due to its consistently cold temperatures, and historical climatologists have mined weather journals like these eagerly in order to reconstruct long-term meteorological patterns. But for historians interested in the knowledge and culture of people in the past, they pose a rather different set of questions. Why were people so interested in the weather? How did they gather their information? And, perhaps most importantly, why did they feel the need to write it all down?

Climatic distress

Janet Burnet’s diary offers a vivid picture of the harsh realities of poor weather in the eighteenth century. One of her chief concerns was its effects on the growth of local produce. Her diary entries provide almost daily updates on how the weather helped, or, more often, hampered the growth of crops on her own estate, as well as in her wider locality.

Janet was eye witness to one of eighteenth-century Scotland’s worst dearth periods in 1782–83. As early as August 1782, Janet was reporting frost at night, which became consistent and more severe by September. Crops never ripened. By 20 October, ‘Our Corns [had] hardly Changd in the Colour & much of the Corns as Green as Grass, very little of the Crop in General throw the whole Country Cut Doun & got in’. By 24 October, farmers were cutting their crops whether ripe or not ‘as there can be no hopes of its ever being better’. By the end of the month, rain, snow, ‘Violent wind, & sever Frost’ were signs of what was to be a bleak winter.

Janet was also acutely aware of the impact of poor harvests on the cost of provisions, exhibiting a keen interest in prices that we have already noted in a previous post. In 1793, for example, she lamented that ‘in August the Crop lookd So ill – and so little Old Meal – that it rose to 15 pence the peck – and Continoud at that price till October when it Came doun to 1 Sh [12 pence] the peck’.

Calamitous weather reports

Janet’s account was also punctuated regularly with news of natural disasters and other calamitous weather events elsewhere. In early February 1783, she noted that ‘We heard the Great Earthquake that Messina & Calabri Was quite destroyed with’. What she had heard was one of the Calabrian earthquakes, a series of five in February and March that year which claimed up to 50,000 lives across southern Italy.

Reggio and Messina earthquake, 1783.
Reggio and Messina earthquake, 1783.

Contemporary illustration of the damage caused by the first Calabrian earthquake, 5 February 1783.

Janet also noted traumatic weather events closer to home. In July 1783, she recorded thunderstorms that were ‘very Universal over all England & the South of Scotland & Houses Much hurt & a good Many people Killd’ and ‘a great deal damage about Newcastle’. On another occasion in September 1786, strong winds in England knocked down houses and overturned stage coaches, leaving ‘Several People Killd & many hurt & much Loss at Sea’.

Janet was evidently interested in wider British and European weather as well as that closer to home. How she learned about conditions further afield is not always clear, but her diary demonstrates that she had access to an expansive network of communication and information – and that she wasn’t the only one interested in the weather.

Newspapers were one possible source. Just as Janet was recording the damage around Newcastle and other parts of England in July 1783, The Newcastle Courant reported in that month that ‘Last week was rendered remarkable the many accidents occasioned by the storms of thunder lightning’.

Personal networks also helped. Earlier in 1783 she mentioned receiving letters from Paris dated 29 March reporting a flurry of snow. Later, in January 1789, she noted that

the frost & Storm here is nothing to what they have had in France, Germany etc - & Even in England where there has not been such Frost or So Sever a Winter known, the thermometer at Lipsick the 17 December was 27 degrees below what it was in 1709, 1740 or 1782 – the Rhine Froze So as wagons & Cariges passed over.

An amateur meteorologist?

Janet’s remarkable ability to compare temperatures across time and space also hints at another context within which this diary should be viewed: the development of the science of meteorology. She didn’t refer to temperature in numerical terms often, but evidently possessed a mercury-in-glass thermometer, the likes of which were being produced by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit from the 1710s.

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, early eighteenth century.
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, early eighteenth century.

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, early eighteenth century.

So maybe a motive for keeping this diary was to participate in the emergent culture of amateur science. Certainly, the rise of meteorology gave a new framework within which people could understand the weather. Whereas earlier diarists like Ralph Josselin sought providential explanations for the weather, seeing it as the result of Divine acts, and some may even have blamed witchcraft, Janet’s diary reflects a more passive observation of natural phenomena.

Memories for all seasons

Evidently, a wealth of sophisticated knowledge lay beneath Janet’s often mundane descriptions of weather. Perhaps, though, the most important way of seeing this diary is as a more modest attempt on Janet’s part to situate herself within the natural world she inhabited, and to record this for posterity. Entries in which Janet compared weather in different times and places hint at another key reason that diaries such as these were produced: to remember.

Recollections of anomalous weather prompted individual reflection, but could also be part of the collective memory of communities. In January 1784, for example, Janet noted that ‘the Sea Came out 40 Yards further then the Oldest Man Ever remembers’. On another day in February 1783, ‘the Mercury was Observed to be Lower than it had been for Eight Years’. The contrast between the reading of a personal scientific instrument on the one hand, and the communal observation of tides on the other, demonstrates the variety of ways that weather could be interpreted.

The desire to remember helps explain why Janet kept the diary for such a large portion of her long life. After she died in 1802 aged eighty-four, such memories were preserved as the manuscript was passed down through generations, eventually falling into the possession of Mowbray Pearson, the great, great, great, great granddaughter of Janet’s sister, who published an edition of the diary in 1994.

There is, no doubt, much more that could be said about the evolution of news and information networks, about evolving epistolary cultures in a crucial period of expansion in Britain’s postal networks, or about the growth of amateur science and a burgeoning interest in the climate. Perhaps these will feature in a later post. But taken as a whole, the most fitting observation to be drawn from Janet Burnet’s diary is that she was, like so many of us, fascinated by the weather.

N.b. in some quotations from Janet’s diary, punctuation has been added and contractions expanded for clarity.

Confused about historic currency and units of measurement? Check out our helpful factsheet here.


Sources

Mowbray Pearson (ed.), More Frost and Snow: The Diary of Janet Burnet, 1758–1795 (Edinburgh, 1994).

Newcastle Courant, 19 July 1783