The Beast from the East Feb/Mar 2018

Weather men were forecasting the "Beast from the East" was going to hit the whole country at the end of Feb/beginning of March. They certainly gave us plenty of notice as they were telling us about  it for several days. Did we believe them?   Did we believe it would affect us on this side of the country in Annan? Would it be as bad as they were suggesting?
Well, with hindsight - they were absloutely right, and it did indeed reach and affect us in Annan - and places further to the west of us!
So on Tuesday 27th March we went to bed wondering what we would find when we opened the curtains next morning .....
Cue song:- The weather outside was frightful

  the fire (or in our case radiator) was so delightful

and since we've no place to go

let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. 

The wind was a problem though - it was so strong it was blowing the snow into drifts. Not a great problem for us in the garden but a huge one on roads, and made conditions treacherous. Some minor roads where snow had drifted were completely buried - up to the height of the hedges!
The UK apparently became a victim of the northern polar jet stream, which twisted its direction unexpectedly, drawing in very cold air from the east. The change of direction was caused by a jump in temperatures over the Arctic - known as a sudden stratospheric warming. (!!!!)
This warming weakened the jet stream that brings warm air from the Atlantic to the UK and so very cold air from Russia was dragged over to us. Not quite as cold as they get in Russia but colder than we are used to!
We almost dreaded opening the curtains on Thursday morning but it didn't look any worse than the night before! We had spent the day before constantly topping up the bird feeders and were rewarded with a range of birds. Many of them were our regulars but we did get a few visitors. Unfortunately they were rather nervous and many didn't stay long enough to get photographs. We did find evidence of their visits in the footprints that lay in the snow.

The star visitor however was the Fieldfare that found the berries on our holly bush and came back regularly for the next three days.

Day 3 of the snowfest began quietly and some of the heavy snow on top of bushes etc had actually disappeared. 

We even ended the day with a sunset!!
Because it was so cold the snow hung around for days. We didn't go out in the car for almost a week and even when the roads were clear there were still patches of snow in fields and under hedges.
The snow had been beautiful to look at, but we were very lucky to have not been affected by it in any major way.