Where has all the fog gone?

Fog is a quiet kind of weather. It doesn’t beat down loudly on the roof like rain, or rattle the windows like wind. Fog won’t leave red marks on your skin like the sun, and you can’t mould it with your hands like snow. It is silent and unassuming, which is probably why we have not noticed that fog seems to be slipping away. 

A 2009 study found that in Europe there had been a 50% drop in ‘low-visibility’ events (fog, mist and haze) since the 1970s, and around the world coastal fog is declining – which many scientists believe to be a direct result of climate change. In areas such as California, this reduction of fog – with the resultant heat and loss of moisture – could have disastrous consequences for ecology, and for the human population.

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We see fog as something that floats over the surface – drifting by and passing through – but its tendrils are tightly plaited through the layered landscape. When fog inhabits a place, it leaves behind an indefinable trace – a feather-light memory of cloud’s quietly reverberating touch. Fog is captured by moisture-loving lichen and moss, living on in fragments of forgotten temperate rainforest that can be found in foggy locations such as Eryri and Cork. 

The uncanniness of this eerie weather condition is woven into the folklore of our once misty isles. On Dartmoor, to be caught in the fog is known as being ‘pixie-led’. It was believed that pixies could conjure a fog to deliberately disorientate walkers, as could a local witch called Vixiana, who would summon a thick fog and lure travellers off the path in order to perish in a bog. 

In Meirionnydd, Wales, the mountain Cadair Idris was said to be the domain of a dark and malicious king of the mist called the Brenin Llwyd. People, especially children, who strayed too high onto the slopes risked being snatched away by this terrifying individual, who approached the unwary in stealthy silence. The folklore of the East Anglian Fens tells of the ‘mist-whisperer’ Tiddy Mun, a strange creature, small as a child with long white hair and beard. He wore a pale-grey gown that blended with the evening mist, lived in the depths of the marsh waterholes, and protected his foggy fenland home by cursing those who threatened it.

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Fog floats through history, too. In 19th- and early 20th-century London, the water vapour of natural white fog mingled with dirty smoke released by factories and home fires to create smogs known as pea soupers which were so tenacious that fog even made its way into Londoners’ homes. These smogs were dangerous, posing a deadly threat to health through illness (particularly of the lungs) and also by increasing the risk of accident on the roads and river. Yet the transformative atmospheric effects of thickly swirling fog appealed to the public imagination and London fog, preserved in literature and art, became so much an integral part of the character of the city that London’s foggy associations endure today.

While writing my book Chasing Fog, I travelled the UK and beyond searching for fog, through a year and out the other side. During this time, I kept a ‘fog diary’, which seemed to confirm my fear that fog is becoming increasingly scarce. Even when using the secrets of the satellites to track cloud, fog is not easily predicted – the days that promise fog are few, and the days that bring it are now far fewer. 

In the January lockdown of 2021, I recall day after stunning day of hoar frost and freezing fog. We walked for hours in a fog-fuzzed valley, flasks of hot chocolate in our backpacks, as my children lifted discs of pearlescent ice in their gloved hands, laughter clouding out to meet the fog. In January 2023, while I wrote my book’s final chapters, there was barely a wisp of fog: the weather was almost ceaseless rain, with storms that brought terrible flooding – events that have recurred this autumn. 

Our weather patterns are changing fast, and fog may be fading. Although we can trace it with meteorological data, weather is not something that exists on the other side of a screen. It is here, it is now, it is us. The future, like the fog, is opaque, but if we listen for its whisper, fog has much to teach us: about the landscape, the weatherscape and about who we are.

Chasing Fog by Laura Pashby is out now (Simon & Schuster, £18.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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