The Big Freeze - Dec 2022

It's one of those questions that baffle even Mr. Google at times ! Answer is 'A tight jersey' 😁

-6.5°C here now and a heavy fog.

Milk lorry had -10 in the cab anyway. Manage to get water flowing to wash the tank but the parlour is a pia. Fecking hate hard freezing as much as I hate snow, just wastes a day getting fcuking going

End in sight thankfully.The much maligned big round JFC troughs are great in this weather. Have two with the heifers and one with the yearlings. Filling them with a garden hose that I reel up and put in at night. Cows keeps theirs running.

Really hasn’t been a batch on other cold spells here. Remember slurry channels and shed passages freezing in 10/11

Have you rainwater harvesting for the shed water troughs cause i would love to do this

Rain here now in the west.

was talking to a fella who was them bottom fill water tanks out in the field and they stayed filling, he just broke the ice on top a few times.

Ibc tanks are the business. Put it on pallet forks, drinkers filled in minutes

how Did ye manage to stop the IBC from freezing? I filled mine up, came out yesterday morning and the tap that’s on it and the tap I installed on top of that were frozen solid. 2/3 kettles of boiling hot water couldn’t thaw it out

Feeling the rise in temps here as I fodder. One less layer of clothing and less ice in water bowls

Cut rushes today, might as well take advantage of the frozen ground

Fell this morning too and on Thursday

Andrew Marr

On the 23 Jan 1947 Britain awoke to what become the coldest winter of the century. Icy winds, heavy frost and quiet a lot of snow, real austerity weather. For 3 months the coal waiting by the pits had to stay there, frozen and buried. One by one the power stations had to close. Within a week 2 million people had been laid off. England caught in the cold grip of economic crises, the sea frozen for the first time since 1929. With compressed air drill parsnips are harvested. And England on this frozen island a little piece of coal becomes of great importance. As the crisis grew Atlee's government was drawing up secret plans for dealing with mass starvation. The plans were declassified in 1978, an alarming economic file in post war Britain with a famine food programme, military style conscription to work the land, taking off 50k school children to take in the harvest.

I wonder what it was like in Ireland during the same period

I remember my Dad telling me that he and many of his friends had to go up the Dublin mountains to rear turf during the war years. Sugar and tea were scarce and the tea leaves were used over and over. My Mam told me that her parents (Longford) used to send food packages to her by train as she was living in Dublin. A lot of people kept a few hens in their back gardens in the city.

Local roads in north Clare were absolutely lethal this morning. Freezing rain fell through the night and the roads were already wet from previous rain. Several cars overturned and stuck in ditches. People really seemed to be caught unaware of the whole thing because it was just a yellow warning. It possibly should have been red given how lethal the roads were.

My mum told me that when she was a child there was a stump of a tree in their garden maybe 7ft tall. During a snowstorm my grandfather went out and cut the tree level with the snow as they were out of fuel. When the snow subsided the stump was left standing tall.

one of the interesting stories she shared with me late one night over tea while nursing her in her final weeks.

The father in law whose plenty young enough remembers vaguely 47 and says the snow drifts were still under ditches and trees till late may early June.

I think it was particularly bad in the midlands, so much so that they had difficulty opening the graves to bury the dead

Saddest event I heard of locally was a child and his uncle perished in a snow blizzard while returning from town on foot with provisions. They were found the following day both dead and huddled together.

Not sure of the date but it was well into April possibly around the 20th.