Two days ago we covered the floods of 1894, torrential rains for weeks on end and torrents of water in Newlyn and St Ives. Today, just to show how variable our weather can be, we have record high pressure and clear skies.

It's been raining for a month, 10 inches of rain since the 19th October....

It's been hot, but the pressure has suddenly fallen, a storn is coming. How bad will it be?

William Borlase was a keen observer of the weather and other natural events andhe certainly got his fill on 28th July 1761...

The winter of 1836/37 is not generally cited as a particularly bad one but in St Ives the weather was severe enough to prompt John Tregerthen Short to comment several times in his diary:

It was on Monday March 9, back in 1891 that the giant blizzard struck the county. The fine weather of the past weeks suddenly ended, the temperature dropped quickly, and snow began to fall as the wind increased in strength. There was tremendous damage to property in the next few days, trains were de-railed, many ships wrecked around the Cornish coast, and throughout the county there were stories of lives lost in snowdrifts…

History is made every day, but interpretation can only come with distance. So today we present the raw stuff of History – some primary sources, free of the intermediary hand.