Travellers to the Scottish Highlands used to admire a sight that is now exceedingly rare – the mountain tops capped with snow all summer long. Daniel Defoe, John Keats, Robbie Burns and even Queen Victoria all wrote about the white-topped peaks in summer.
There was a tradition for Highland tenants to give their landlords buckets of snow in summer for chilling the food and wine cellar. And one gentlemen's climbing party in August 1786 described how they stopped for lunch at a high ridge "depositing our champagne, porter etc. in one of the large snow drifts."
England, too, had year-round snow patches, most remarkable of all at Brockhampton Quarry in the Cotswolds. In 1634 one report described that "on January did fall the greatest snow that known in the memory of man … and in August following a great quantity of the same snow and ice did remayne at Brockhampton quares."
In Cool Britannia (Paragon Publishing, 2010), veteran mountain expert Adam Watson and mountain hiker Iain Cameron have compiled a remarkable compendium of year-round snow patches in Britain through history.
But from the 1930s onwards the snow patches vanished, and since then they have become a rare sight, presumably a victim of Britain's changing climate. The days of gentlemen climbers cooling their champagne in summer snows are long gone.