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William Cobbett was riding from Botley in Hampshire to London, on a beautiful summer's day in 1808 when he saw a cloud of dust.
"Soon after there appeared to rise another cloud of dust at the same place, and that then disappeared, and the spot was clear again.
"As we were totting along a very smart pace, we soon came to this narrow place, having one valley to our right and the other valley to our left, and there, to my great astonishment, I saw the clouds come one after another, each appearing to be about as big as two or three acres of land, skimming along the valley on the north side, a great deal below the tops of the hills; and successively, as they arrived at our end of the valley, rising up, crossing the narrow pass, and then descending down into the other valley and going off to the south, so that we who sate there on our horses, were alternately in clouds and in sunshine," he reports in that peripatetic classic Rural Rides, in a passage spotted by a reader, Carolyn Fisher of Lincolnshire.
"It is a universal rule that if there be a fog in the morning, and that fog go from the valleys to the tops of the hills, there will be rain that day, and if it disappear by sinking in the valley, there will be no rain that day.
"The truth is that fogs are clouds, and clouds are fogs. They are more or less full of water; but they are all water; sometimes a sort of steam, and sometimes water that falls in drops."
