Contributions – open-weather

2025-05-21 22:00:00

Hospitalfield

Arbroath, Scotland

Scotland

NOAA-19

I’ve been saying it’s not rained for a month for a while now. It must be longer. It gives me a sense of unease. Scorched grass. Arid dune-scapes. A feeling that there’s dust hanging in the air. The BBC reports the driest spring in 60 years. Getting frustrated by sprinklers on pristine university lawns, while there’s advice from Scottish Water to take short showers. According to SEPA my area has ‘moderate scarcity’ of water, one step below ‘significant’. I’ve headed over to Hospitalfield today to check on the Automatic Ground Station. The cool of the inside of the building gives me the feeling of being in my mum’s school classroom during the holidays. It’s quiet, lots of the staff are away on a trip down south. I tell Veronika I’m going up the tower, just for safety. We’ve not received an image in a few days so clearly something is not working. The AGS is housed in the object collections store room, halfway up the spiralling staircase to one of the towers: the antenna on its roof. I have images in my head of the antenna dislodged and dangling down the side of the tower, or the AGS strewn across the floor in bits. Instead when I get to it, nothing has moved and it’s politely telling me what’s wrong on its display screen: Wifi error. After un- and re- plugging the set up it’s back to displaying the time of the next pass (10.00pm) and seems to be working fine. While I wait for the reboot I notice the window is open, and a plump wood pigeon is on the sill, threatening to come inside (it’s clearly been in before). I squeeze past the rail of costumes, and various Victoriana to close it, pushing the window gently into contact with the puffed up bird. It ruffles and quickly drops off, down and away in response. Out on the roof of the tower I’m drawn again to the bricks, the lichen on the outer walls, and the lightning rod. The antenna has joined this collection of weathering things: as though the tower’s small footprint is some strange elevated plinth. There’s some speckles of patina now on the antenna, and its once-bright copper has dulled somewhat since we installed it: it’s settling in. I have a camera with me to document it in place, and I feel a bit daft as I spin around the tiny area trying to cover all the angles. It’s so bright it’s hard to see if I’m in focus so I blindly snap more than I need. The only cloud is a vague smear on the vast blue sky: like one weak skoosh from a nearly empty can of white spray paint. From my spinning I notice I can see the water tower from here, on its hill above the pond. It’s sham-medieval, Victorian, and no longer supplies the town with water. I do a quick search on Canmore and find the impetus for its construction: “The drought of 1870 and the increase in housing around Arbroath precipitated the Arbroath Corporation to seek a supplementary water supply.” (Precipitated, ha). Its caverns must still contain gallons and gallons. A few years ago there were plans to turn it into a diver training centre (for offshore workers) but it didn’t come to anything. To the north there’s new housing going up on former grain fields. Peeking through the balustrade (parapet?) I can look over to more of this building’s towers: I know one is an old water tank and the other square one has sundials carved into its sandstone faces. I head down and outside to find Ross to tell him about the pigeon (and that I’m off the tower). I find him in the back of the walled garden while another small drama is unfolding. Together we watch a man (summoned for this job) very calmly coax a bee colony into a new hive. It’s quite mesmerising to watch the bees drift in the air around us, and the mass of bee-bodies clustered on the elder bush gradually slump into the box. He says there’s four hives nearby, and that these bees are not from those, but he’ll find somewhere for them.

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