Jack Frost and Fifteen Hundred Cranes Declare Winter

Today was the first day of ground frost this winter, after several days of northerly winds. At about five o'clock in the evening thousands of Cranes flew high over head, at first in a lacework of skeins each containing more than a hundred birds then in swirling, spiralling groups which sometimes were invisible against the pale blue of the evening sky - so that a group would seem to materialise out of nowhere - sometimes black, sometimes white or both. They were flying south for he winter calling to each other as they went.

Only just over a week ago the temperature reached 29C and tropical storm Grace, which in a very unusual meteorological event had formed a few days earlier over the Azores, dissipated as it reached Ireland. This tropical storm formed at the centre of a large low which had come up from the latitude of the Cape Verde Islands and it was air from this low that gave us the very high temperatures. So in just over a week we have moved from high summer to winter.