The question which springs to my mind now is whether this year's good summer marks the beginning of a flip back to a period of mostly decent or reasonable summers like many we saw in the 1990s and in the noughties up to and including 2006, or whether it will merely be a blip and we will return to the usual British mediocre summer next year. For all the rave reviews this summer had and the predictions of summers like this year becoming more common, it is easy to forget that we had just endured a decade of predominantly mediocre summers from 2007 up to and including 2017.

Let's see what the summers of the next decade or so bring us.

Over the next decade I'll go for 7 lousy summers, 2 reasonable summers and one cracker. 

The bit in bold has got to be an understatement Mediocre is a very generous description of a horrifically wet and dull decade of summer weather. The worst ever decade for summers.

Given this summer was akin to 1975 or 1994 I'm hoping 2019 will be more like 1976 or 1995 but I somehow doubt it.

The summers of the 2020s have got to be an improvement on those of the 2010s that's for sure. It's hard to imagine how things could sink any lower.

Btw, May-Aug this year had definitely stronger blocking at 500mb than 1995 (1st plot) and almost on par with 1976 (2nd plot)

True for Aberdeen perhaps, but down here in SE England my subjective impression is that the 1960s were  far worse than the 2010s, even if you ignore 2018. Going further back, I don't really remember the 1950s, but the data suggests that, apart from 1955 and 1959, the summers were generally pretty poor, with some of them being exceptionally wet.

It would have been ever worse had it not been for the better summers of 2013 and 2014. They are the only two summers that could even be described as decent, let alone good, of them all from 2007 up to and including last year.

I think 2012 was the only genuinely bad summer of the 2010s here. 2011 was lacklustre too but was at least dry, unlike the washout of 2012.

2013 and 2014 were both good, 2018 was excellent. 2010, 2015, 2016 and 2017 were all pretty unremarkable, although 2015 of course had that record hot July day with temperatures reaching 90F all the way up to Yorkshire.

I feel like the 1980s were worse for the most part. 1986 and 1987 were atrocious.

Mean Temp +1 C

Rainfall 90%

Sunshine 115%

Highest Maximum 28 C

If anyone needs any conclusive evidence that I live in what has to be the most boring part of the country when it comes to our weather, this is certainly it (or least, this will go a very long way towards doing so).

1985 was the worst summer of the 80s in my part of the world. As far as I know, that summer was Glasgow's wettest summer of the entire 20th century, not just the 1980s so that shows just how bad it was. We have had some pretty poor ones in more recent times, especially in the past few years, but as far as my area is concerned I don't know if summer 1985 had yet been surpassed for rainfall.

1986 and 1987 weren't great summers overall but I think that both saw some decent weather at some point. I can remember going to Edinburgh with my mum was a six-year-old one Sunday in August '86 to watch the festival street parade along Princes Street, and I recall it being a gloriously sunny day and pretty warm too.

The current issue of the English Heritage magazine has a photo of the parched grass at Portchester Castle showing crop marks this summer revealing a Tudor storehouse. Not surprising in itself, but interesting that these marks were last seen so clearly in 1938.

If folks have been boxing clever then we will have a mountain of drone footage across swathes of the UK to paw over this winter?

Whilst still with the planning dept we did a low level survey of our area looking for unauthorised Tree Preservation violations and I found a what looked to be a group of roundhouses in the field behind where I used to live.

Checked them out on the ground and they were very convincing esp. their location?

The area has a number of settlements named in the Doomsday book so there were already folk living along the springline of the Calder Valley then ( and the neolithic circle above Mount Skip pushes this date way back!).

The village here was revealed to be surrounded by a network of Iron Age fields, in the centre of a silage field by the farm a circular feature was fairly obvious with a round cornered rectangle surrounding it.
You could even see the entrance, and a lane between the plots where they went up and down to work them.
The local history group arranged a geo-magnetic survey, which confirmed a circular feature but very little else.
The crop marks were especially good this time, as the drought got going early enough to be very influential on grass regrowth and ripening cereals through July.

Roundhouse features are more frequently found on the moors which have generally had less disturbance, and have been dated likely in use from around 1500BC to 300BC, these features on better land in the valley are from the same period when clearly there was a substantial population - probably more than today. 

The 'end' date co-incides with Roman occupation, but there seems to be some evidence that the settlements were to some extent 'Romanised' and some buildings from later dates have the modern invention of corners.
A local person who served in Roman military might return to the village in later life as a relatively wealthy chap, and build a fancy new place having seen what the Romans had built elsewhere.