ABSTRACT
Central and southern Scotland can be defined as lying roughly between the Highland Boundary Fault, which runs north-eastwards from the Firth of Clyde to the North Sea coast south of Aberdeen, and the border between Scotland and England, which is itself defined by the course of the river Tweed and the Cheviot Hills. Such a large area, which has a maximum west-to-east extent of 210 km and a north-south extent of 260 km, inevitably contains a complex array of local climates and it is no easy task to identify a broad subregional zonation. However, the identification of the principal climatic controls opens the door, if only a little, to an understanding of the most noteworthy features of a climate which ranges from a cold north-east coast, where Robert Louis Stevenson described Edinburgh as having ‘one of the vilest climates under heaven’ (Paton 1951), to the mild south-west, where the climates of Wigtownshire and Dumfriesshire have been variously described as ‘genial’ (Sutherland 1925) and ‘amenable’ (Wood 1965).
