Scotland’s Eternal Companion: A New Exhibition Celebrates the Rain That Shapes a Nation
It’s only fitting that, 250 years ago, one of Scotland’s greatest minds turned his attention to the country’s most persistent companion: rain. James Hutton, the father of modern geology, even devised a “theory of rain” in 1784, outlining how water vapor condenses in the air. Now, his calculations anchor a fresh exhibition at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, dedicated to the 100 to 160 billion cubic meters of rain that fall on Scotland each year.
The show pairs Scotland’s literary icons—Minnie the Minx and Robert Burns—with swatches of Mackintosh fabric, the waterproof material invented by Glasgow chemist Charles Macintosh in 1823. Alongside vintage Beano comics (including one where Minnie learns about storm safety from the Met Office), visitors can see a rare original of King James VI’s “Daemonologie.” Written in 1597 during witch persecutions, the book blames sorcerers for conjuring storms that delayed his new queen’s ship from Denmark. “They can raise stormes and tempests in the aire,” the king wrote. That text inspired the witches in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” also featured here, alongside the rain-soaked flight of Burns’s Tam O’Shanter.
“Rain is in our manuscripts, maps, poetry, newspapers—you name it,” says Alison Stevenson, the library’s director of collections. “We talk about it, dress for it, measure it, avoid it, sing about it. This exhibition covers all perspectives.”
Happily, the gallery sits just steps from the entrance, perfect for tourists dodging a shower. Inside, early rain maps include one from 1912 charting 25 years of data—and a surprise: Edinburgh is one of the UK’s drier cities, getting less rain than Rome. Visitors can play TV meteorologist on a forecast wall with old-school detachable weather symbols. Heather Reid, known to BBC Scotland viewers as “Heather the Weather,” will open the show on June 17.
The exhibits span from an 1864 poem by angler Thomas Tod Stoddart lamenting a drought to a diary entry from 1889, where Mary Cumming Bruce sketches a rain-soaked boy staring at her umbrella—then a status symbol. The exhibition also honors Mel Houston, the library’s preventive conservator, killed in a 2023 flash flood in the Borders. She worked to protect the collection from climate change. The show runs until April 30, 2027.