Earlier today I popped out to deposit a canary in Ford Park to gather more data. As I felt I needed the exercise I took a walk over hoad hill on my way to pick up some more wool from Loopy’s in Ulverston. Coming down off the hill into the town I immediately became aware of a faint but foul stench, reminding me of both Painthorpe pig farm and the smell of burning hair during boring science lessons at school. This smell grew stronger as I got further towards the town centre. I spent a little time trying to locate the source of the smell but most of the clouds emitted from the buildings in town were pleasantly fragrant in comparison. The situation continued to get worse and a thick mist descended upon Ulverston. I returned quickly to Lanternhouse to get a mobile canary in order to investigate any possible correlations between what I was smelling and the overall quality of the air. I followed the cloud from Neville Street to the edge of Ulverston along Stockbridge lane, at which point the smell began to disappear, so I headed back into town to gather what data I could.

Despite the canary not being calibrated and therefore not being able to give precise readings on what amounts of which chemicals are present in the air, we can contrast the results gathered using the same equipment on different days. Ruskin characterised the plague-clouds descending upon Coniston according to their erratic movement. While I can’t comment on the visual movements of the cloud surrounding Ulverston this evening, the reading I was getting while seeking out its thresholds were certainly erratic in contrast to that which I’ve become accustomed to seeing while walking around the area. The first two images above show a plot of air quality against location gathered earlier this evening. The faint green line shows the route taken through town and the size of the circles indicates fluctuations in air quality. The third image is a plot of a similar walk taken a couple of days ago, on what can be considered a fairly normal day in Ulverston with only very minor fluctuations in air quality throughout the town. There was something in the air tonight, and it wasn’t very nice.

An alternative plot of this evening’s data: