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Spring: Leeds folklore expert and weatherman's view
This weekend marks the traditional start of spring, which means longer days, shorter nights and (hopefully) warmer weather.
Neil Hudson asked a folklore expert and a weatherman what spring meant to them.
The name 'vernal equinox' sounds vaguely mystical and conjures up images of shrouded figures moving through ancient stone monuments on mist-laden dawns. Equinoxes are one of those things I feel I ought to be more familiar with but, like most people of the TV generation, I'm not.
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In fact, the vernal (or spring) equinox is one of only two days in the year when day and night are of equal length. Afterwards, days begin to get longer.
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Historically, it has been celebrated as a time of renewal, rebirth, revival – a time to chase out evil spirits (hence the habitual 'spring clean') and welcome in more prosperous times.
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The Christian festival of Easter is part of our spring – spring falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox.
Our symbols of spring include Easter bunnies and mad March hares, but where do those images come from?
Folklore expert Stephen Sayers, head of social sciences at Leeds Metropolitan University, said many traditional symbols associated with spring were common to cultures across the world.
He said: "Some cultures use March 21 as the first day of their new year, for example, Zoroastrianists in Iran.
It's when the day and night are in equal balance. Their religion is based on the ideas of the powers of light and darkness. This is also where the ideas of sin and righteousness come from.
"Many cultures mark the first full moon after the equinox, for example, the festival of Dionysus in Greece lands on the first full moon following equinox. The Jewish festival of Passover is also around this time, which itself is modelled on an earlier Pagan festival called Pesach, which was traditionally when the herds of sheep would be sent out to graze. It is associated with fertility.
"The old name for April was Eosturmonath, named after Eostre, the Goddess of spring and dawn. It also gives us the word eostrogen, associated with female fertility.
"Hares were sacred in pre-Christian times. They are renowned for being fertile – there are even stories of them being able to become pregnant while they are pregnant, of them sleeping during the day with their eyes open, coming out at night, leaping and so on. When Queen Boadicea faced the Roman army, she let a hare out before her army to rally them, so potent a symbol were they.
"I'm convinced this is one of the reasons we have hare coursing today, a sport introduced by the Romans as a way of ridiculing hares as a religious symbol – a way of saying, 'this is what we do to hares'.
"Inside St Mary's Church, Beverley, there is a stone carving of a hare, which was used by Sir John Tenniel as inspiration when he illustrated the first edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.
"The idea of eggs and bunnies comes from the fact spring is a time when birds begin to lay eggs and often people would find eggs in what they thought were hare nests, but were probably laid by lapwings. So they became associated with the hares.
"With the onset of spring, sheep were in milk, lambs started to be born, hens were laying eggs and people thought hares brought eggs – all these were important sources of food after a long hard winter and came to represent the possibility of new life."
BBC weatherman Paul Hudson gives a more scientific interpretation of spring, saying spring is typically a month of change in terms of weather.
"March can be very fickle. In 1965, the temperature ranged by some 46 degrees. On March 3, temperatures fell to -21 Celsius in Scotland but by the end of March, in Wakefield, they reached 25 degrees. I dare say people were saying back then that meant we were in for a good summer but remarkably that turned out to be the hottest day of that year. There really are no rules.
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"There are no indicators I know of to predict what the summer will be like. I know there are old sayings for winter, like a lot of berries on trees means it's going to be cold, but I've kept my eye on that and it's hit and miss, in fact more miss really!
"Summers have been poor recently, in fact the last three Julys have been exceptionally wet. One interesting thing I stumbled across when I was looking through over 300 years of rainfall statistics, was that there has never before been four very wet Julys in a row, so statistically, perhaps that means we might be in for a good summer. Then again, who knows?"
He added: "Just because we've had a harsh winter does not mean we will necessarily have a good summer. It's not as straightforward as that. Sometimes it works like that, other times it doesn't.
"Anyone who says they can tell you in the middle of March what this summer is going to be like is pulling the wool over your eyes.
"Certainly, one possible indicator one could look at is El Nino, which is an upwelling of warm water in the Pacific, which has an effect on weather globally. It can affect our weather here.
"There was an El Nino in 2002 and if you recall, in 2003, Europe suffered stifling heatwaves and the UK recorded its hottest ever day, when temperatures reached 38.5 Celsius.
"The only problem is that there was an El Nino in 2006-7 and in Yorkshire we suffered some of the worst flooding in history during June of that year."
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -1 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Light rain
Temperature: 1 C to 6 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: North west
