Mystery, muse and metaphor: There's more to fog than meets the eye

The Romans came, saw and disliked our climate. Their historian Tacitus recorded of Britannia that its meteorology was ‘pretty foul’, largely because of its ‘extreme’ fog. They never did get the loveliness of fog, our signature weather.

The Inuit may have a sledge-worth of words for snow, but the British lexicon for fog is rich in number and sophistication. I give you ‘fret’ and ‘roke’ for English mist coming off the sea, whereas the Scots have their synonymous ‘haar’. Then there is ‘brume’, the mist that summons melancholy, bruma being the Latin for winter. As the fog expert Laura Pashby declares in her 2004 book, Chasing Fog: Finding Enchantment in a Cloud, the white murk of the Tyne, the Fens, Dartmoor and the Fife coast is an intangible, but national ‘heritage’.

Fog. Difficult to grasp. Certainly, different to mist, which is more transparent. Literally so: the technical difference between the two vaporous states is that in fog visibility is restricted to 1,000 metres; if you can see further in the condensed water-droplet murk, it is mist. Mist is ephemeral, banished by the midday sun, a waft of wind, but land, sea and estuary can be ‘fog bound’ for days. Mist is a ‘veil’; fog is a ‘blanket’. It is the impenetrability of fog that gives the weather state its mystique, its transformative power. When we are ‘fog bound’, the familiar is made unfamiliar. Our control over the world is lost. Everything that fog shrouds in its dense whiteness is rendered ancient and we and our ancestors are simultaneous.

There is something liberating, too, in a walk in fog along, say, a country lane. The rest of the world is cut off. One becomes original. Yet the whiteness swaddles like a pleasant cocoon. If fog diminishes sight, our most privileged sense, it is Nature’s way of reminding us that a vignette is as valuable as vista. On that same country lane in November, the close-up view obliged by fog reveals, in the leafless hedge, the small black bowl of the previously unnoticed dunnock nest. Further along, the bare beech trees hold the fog in their beams and to walk under them is a monk’s ambulation in a quiet cloister. Fog fogs, but it has its visual beauties, too — the way that, if one is standing on a clear hill top, the foggy valley below appears to be a pearlescent sea, the tops of the bare winter trees poking through, the masts of ghostly galleons long since abandoned.

We are not alone in being fog-affected. Hunting hawks are half-sighted and may remain at roost all day; songbirds stay silent as their efforts will be useless in the muffling white. Migrating birds may halt their movement.

Fog. Sly stuff, very difficult to grasp in every way. Although replete with wonder, it has its dualities and duplicities. Thick fog clams to the face, smells like disinfectant, catches suffocatingly, smokily in the nose and throat. ‘Fog-bound’ is the airport inconveniently closed and claustrophobic oppression. In olden days, baffled by the fog, travellers on Dartmoor worried they were being led astray in the suddenly markerless landscape by pixies. Who can blame them? There are days when fog is inexplicable, arising spirit-white from some creek, dingle, marsh or moor like an evil exhalation of the earth.

Unsurprisingly, the magical, if ambivalent, qualities of fog have besotted writers and artists. Save the Romans, that is, who were always a prosaic, transactional people — which is why Latin is logical. As early as the 14th century, Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym was experimenting with textile metaphors for fog and the mood they duly induced, with the fabric of fog in his poem Y Niwl becoming increasingly ominous, worsening from ‘shaggy cloak’ to a ‘broad web of thick deceptive cambric’. Without fog, we’d lack half of Victorian literature. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll used fog to obfuscate Mr Hyde’s evil deeds. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles bayed out of Gothic Dartmoor miasma; Jack the Ripper’s true crimes prospered beneath the fog ebbing through the back streets of London’s Whitechapel. Dickens’s London is, of course, unthinkable without the backcloth of a ‘pea-souper’, the phrase invented in 1849 by visiting American Herman Melville for the capital’s particularly noxious blend of yellow, sulphurous chimney smoke and fog coming off the capital’s river. The ‘pea-souper’, despite the nutritional suggestion in its nomenclature, was a killer. In 1879, a 200% increase in human mortality was recorded during foggy periods. As late as 1952, a performance at Sadler’s Wells had to be halted because the audiences inside the theatre couldn’t see the stage due to smog.

For Dickens, the fog of London was more than a convenient mood setter: it was metaphor. In Bleak House, the fog symbolises the mystification caused by the endless obduracy of the law. In Our Mutual Friend, fog is emblem for the moral corruption caused by lust for money.

Great art, too, was born out of our fog. J. M. W. Turner, London-born, advertised his acquaintance with London’s dodgy air quality by painting luminous foggy canvases in his views of the Thames (immortalised by Melville in Moby-Dick ‘as boggy, soggy, squitchy’). Foreign artists tended to see smog less as nuisance, more as opportunity to explore the quality of light. Claude Monet’s 1872 work Impression, Sunrise, shrouded in winter murk, caused a critic to conjure the term ‘Impressionism’ — and an art movement was christened. Cinema has also had its fog-induced creativity. In David Lean’s Brief Encounter, 1945, the capital’s fog is the sensuous cloak covering Alec and Laura’s extramarital love affair. A ‘London particular’ was slang for an exceptionally thick fog in the capital, and a knowing pun on the word ‘particular’ — meaning mistress.

The poor old Romans, then. They never had the foggiest idea about the intricacies and splendours of fog.

This feature originally appeared in the October 29, 2025, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.