So on Thursday I drove down to Saunton to attempt to play golf with some friends who were driving down from Surrey.  I say “attempt to play” as the weather forecast was awful, with it possibly clearing by around 3 or 4pm.

I left Bristol at 11am and as soon as I was just past Weston-Super-Mare it started raining.  And boy did it rain!  At one point everyone was driving at less than 50mph it was so bad.

A quick call to my friends who were on the A303 showed it to be the same over there.

It rained all the way to Barnstaple and when I got to the course at 1pm it was still raining. So into the clubhouse for lunch (chicken caesar salad) and a shandy and by 2pm, it looked bareable i.e. just some spits of rain.

For two holes it was raincoats on, but then it cleared.  By the end of the first hour it was into shirt sleeves and then it looked like this for the next three hours!

Someone once explained this to me by saying that the big sandy dunes area on which Saunton sits acts like a massive heat absorber.  When that heat gets released it often pushes the bad weather over the hills by Barnstaple and out into the Bristol Channel.  Sounds plausible to me.