Bowhill DCNN1935 – how bad does it have to get?

55.54097 -2.90602 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 5 Digital Temperature records archived from 26/12/1954 Site originally from 1857

Bowhill Estate lies in the Scottish Borders region near Selkirk and is credited as being one of Scotland’s finest country houses. In my podcast interview with Tom Nelson I highlighted the example of weather stations in Victorian walled kitchen gardens as the first specific type of unsuitable site largely because I find it almost obscene that the Met Office opts to have so many of its “Climate Reporting” weather stations in such deliberately engineered and totally unrepresentative micro climates. I avoided too many reviews of these types of sites as I felt I was over labouring the point in my early days of reviews. Given the attitude the Met Office has since taken to my enquiries, I no longer feel so constrained to be polite.

For the avoidance of any doubt, walled gardens are completely unacceptable locations to site weather stations to record the natural climate – they were never intended to anyway. Below is an extract from the Bowhill Gardens map notes stating – “Sheltered from the worst of the wind and frost ……”

The Met Office knows perfectly well that the micro climate within these walls will not in reflect anywhere outside its perimeter so why use it and why even disguise exactly what it is? Is this really an educational site?

These “Local Attributes” notes indicate “U” for “Unclassified” an indication of how poor this Class 5S site actually is “2.6 Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C)“

There is no problem whatsoever with recording weather details for horticultural purposes in such sites, in fact it is probably essential for good plant husbandry, but to suggest this is a suitable site for historic temperature record compilation is ridiculous. Another strange representation by the Met Office is the way they fail to report the longevity of this site. The CEDA archive suggests this site only dates from 1954 which is most unlike them to downplay its age. The Scottish Red Book of meteorological archives actually goes back to 1857 and there may be even earlier records in other archives.

So what does this site actually look like in real life? Despite being in a walled garden (with exceptionally high walls visible to the left) it is only a matter of a few metres in front of a glasshouse that is nearly 30 metres long and almost 5 metres high at its apex. Yet again another demonstration of a greenhouse effect not requiring any CO2 emissions at all.

And as can be seen from the headline image, the site is hopelessly susceptible now to heavy shade effects most graphically seen in the close up below with very tall trees to the immediate rear.

Ironically the observational standards here are very good and digitally archived from 1954 to date. On this basis it would be a contender to be one of those “Location Specific, Long Term” sites offering rolling 30 year climate averages from 1961 to 2020. Bizarrely the webpage only recognises “Bowhill” as a location in the county of Fife and offers no local data. Inputting “Selkirk” as a locator similarly ignores the real Bowhill weather station and offers another of the undead Zombie sites at Galashiels (born 1966 – 109 years after the original Bowhill and died 15 years ago in 2010). This begs the obvious question of who decided to ignore a station existing with real data throughout the entire 60 year period and then choose, in lieu, one for whom data had to be fabricated for the initial 6 years and the latter 10 years that is under 6 miles away? That is the type of perfectly legitimate question that the Met Office seems remarkably unwilling to answer even under Freedom of Information request – what is being hidden?

In conclusion, for the purposes of climate reporting and the construction of a national historic temperature record, Bowhill is completely unsatisfactory junk. The Met Office must know this, so why are they deliberately using such inappropriate sites?

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/06/29/bowhill-dcnn1935/