Ben Lowry: There is a risk of heat stroke for marchers today
It will be a brutally hot Twelfth.
Read Ben Lowry’s main column on The links between 1690, the Twelfth and the early US
The temperature in the west of Northern Ireland such as Castlederg is set to reach 29 degrees Celsius, a sweltering 84 Fahrenheit – a typical hot summer day in the Mediterranean. Even Belfast is due to hit 27C (81F). Most years NI’s capital does not reach such heat.
I have been at, or I have reported on, every July 12 since 2000. I could not think of one in that quarter century so hot – although our page 3 story reminds me about 2013.
As a child I think I recall Orangemen walking with rolled up umbrellas, but a recent Twelfth in Belfast made me think this might be a false memory – it was intermittently wet yet few marchers in fact had brollies. Instead they got soaked, wearing white shirts and sashes.
The Belfast walk is so long, five miles from Carlisle Circus to Shaw’s Bridge, that you can see why few walkers would want to carry an umbrella all that way in case of short showers. But today there is risk of heat stroke. I hope they drink plenty of water.
Meanwhile, some people are showing graphics online of temperatures in Britain in 1995 and now, to suggest that it was as hot back then but we make more fuss now. This is wrong. I keep a rough tally of hottest temps, and averages are clearly hotter this century than in the late 20th century. I will write more about it over the summer.