Could the weather have prompted Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, to write her gothic fantasy? Meteorologist and Irish Times columnist Brendan McWilliams thought so and suggested to the Merriman Summer School in Co Clare that a dull, overcast winter during her stay in Geneva with her poet husband, Percy Bysshe, and Byron left the trio bored and with little to do.
They began writing stories to amuse themselves, and the rest, as they say, is history. Great events, even the decline of the Roman Empire, may have been shaped by the weather, he added. For example, a frozen Rhine allowed the advance of the Vandals on Rome in AD406.
Weather and Warfare - A Climatic History of the 1798 Rebellion takes a similar view, looking at a particular event in Irish history and how the forces of nature impacted on it.
This approach is "hindcasting," the opposite of forecasting, and author John Tyrrell has shown that with careful research a picture of what was happening to the weather during the fateful Wexford rising can be established.
He concludes that on 58 occasions during the campaign the weather favoured the insurgents, compared with 38 for the forces of the crown, but that at sea, overwhelmingly, the weather conspired to suit the British. Ships' log books from the time, folklore sources and archival material create a unique platform from which to view the uprising. The book is published by the Collins Press in Cork.