On a cold, windy day in March, colour me green

St Patrick and the weather: St Patrick was well known for his interest in the weather.

St Patrick and the weather: St Patrick was well known for his interest in the weather.

For example, when Oisín returned from Tír na nÓg, Lady Gregory tells us: "It was St Patrick had power at that time, and it was to him that Oisín was brought; and he kept him in his house and used to be teaching him and questioning him."

Patrick asked him to describe the weather as it had been when he was young. The gnarled old man was brief and to the point: "Samhradh riabhach, fomhar grianach, geimhreadh ceoch agus earrach reoch," he told the saint.

Despite alleged natural variations in our climate, the mixture is familiar to us still: "A dull, dismal summer, a sunny autumn, followed by a misty winter and a frosty spring."

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The good saint, however, had his own way of coping with the earrach reoch insofar as it affected him. On one frosty morning he and his followers found themselves on a mountain without a fire to cook breakfast or warm their frozen limbs. Patrick, it is said, desired them to collect a pile of ice and snowballs, and then:

Saint Patrick, as in legends

told,

The morning being very

cold,

In order to assuage the

weather,

Collected bits of ice

together;

He gently breathed upon

the pyre,

And every fragment blazed

on fire.

Patrick could also manipulate the winds to his advantage since, according to age-old tradition, the winds on St Patrick's Day always follow a prescribed pattern.

As our present-day political leaders still do, it was Patrick's custom to go abroad on his own feast day. He had a particular pastoral interest, it seems, in parts of Scotland, and would depart for the Hebrides on the morning of the 17th. To make the journey easier, he always arranged for a following southerly wind in the forenoon, but later changed the wind to a northerly direction to facilitate his return journey - a sequence, it is said, which persists until this very day. No doubt, if he had a mind to do it, the saint could also arrange for the wind to be green in colour for all or part of this, his special day.

Our ancestors on this island, apparently, described the wind direction somewhat unusually by means of a 12-point compass, and a separate colour was metaphorically assigned to each of the 12 directions.

A purple wind, for example, blew from the east, a white wind from the south; between these two, the secondary winds were red and yellow. The north wind was a black and the west wind a brown - and so on to assemble a full kaleidoscope of the compass.

According to Flann O'Brien in The Third Policeman: "People in the old days had the power of perceiving these colours and could spend the whole day sitting quietly on a hillside watching the beauty of the winds, their fall and rise and changing hues, and the magic of neighbouring winds when they are interweaved like ribbons at a wedding."

We are not told from which direction green winds blow - but perhaps we will see them for ourselves today, if we watch them very, very closely.