A nation shaped by rain: exhibition celebrates Scotland’s wettest obsession

Happily for tourists fleeing a summer downpour, the rain exhibition is in a room only a few steps from the National Library of Scotland’s front door. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images View image in fullscreen Happily for tourists fleeing a summer downpour, the rain exhibition is in a room only a few steps from the National Library of Scotland’s front door. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images A nation shaped by rain: exhibition celebrates Scotland’s wettest obsession Minnie the Minx and Macbeth feature in National Library’s exploration of how rainfall has shaped Scottish science, literature, history and identity It seems fitting that, 250 years ago, one of Scotland’s foremost scientists took a close interest in what is arguably the country’s most famous feature: rain James Hutton, celebrated by Scots as the father of modern geology, went so far as to write a formula for “a theory of rain”. In 1784, he sketched out the key principles for the “condensation of aqueous vapour contained in the air” . Now, Hutton’s calculations are to take centre stage in an exhibition celebrating rain at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. Between 100bn and 160bn cubic metres of rain fall on Scotland each year. The library has drawn on two of the country’s great literary heroes – Minnie the Minx and Robert Burns – pairing them with tartan samples of the rainproof Mackintosh fabric invented by the Glasgow-born chemist Charles Macintosh in 1823. View image in fullscreen Minnie the Minx features in the exhitibion. Photograph: Martin Baxendale Alongside copies of the Beano – including a cartoon strip featuring Minnie and the Met Office educating children about the dangers of storms – the National Library of Scotland is showing a rare original copy of Daemonologie, the treatise on witches and the supernatural by King James VI of Scotland and I of England and Wales. View image in fullscreen Children’s books featuring rain in the exhibition. Photograph: The National Library of Scotland Written in 1597 against a backdrop of violent persecution of alleged sorcerers and witches, the text blames them for conjuring months of storms that delayed the boat carrying his new queen Anne of Denmark from arriving in Scotland. “They can raise stormes and tempests in the aire, either upon sea or land,” the king wrote. View image in fullscreen A page from Daemonologie. Photograph: The National Library of Scotland Daemonologie is credited with inspiring the witches who opened William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which also features in the exhibition, alongside the rain that drenches Burns’s antihero Tam O’Shanter as he flees a storm and a “hellish legion” of demons. View image in fullscreen A scene from Macbeth during which one witch asks: ‘When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning or in rain?’ Illustration: Classic Image/Alamy Alison Stevenson, the library’s director of collections, said the institution’s exhibitions were usually biographical or historical, but t