The Moon orbits Earth at an average distance of 239,000 miles, yet it impacts almost everything on our planet, from the way animals behave and plants grow to how tides move. Dixe Wills explores the lunar influence
You know that sound when a group all gasps at once? That collective sharp intake of breath?
I used to lead full-moon walks near the Suffolk coast, sharing tips and tricks for navigating and enjoying the countryside at night. I’m not sure how many of my sage utterances will still be lodged in the minds of my fellow wanderers, but I’ve a notion there will be one memory that will have lived on: the moment on one walk when the stubborn clouds finally parted and the full moon turned the River Blyth from an impenetrable dark mass into a sparkling silver sword and we all gasped at the wonder of it.
Though it may sound like the hackneyed gushing of a romantic novelist, a good bright moon really does cloak all it touches in a delicate cloth of silver. A moonlit scene is so completely different from one viewed in daylight that it can often appear to reveal a wholly different world.
Certainly, that’s been the view of many a British landscape painter. JMW Turner’s ‘Moonlight, a Study at Millbank’, for instance, demonstrates the Moon’s mesmerising effect on water, while Victorian artist John Atkinson Grimshaw made an entire career out of painting England bathed in moonshine.
But the Moon exercises an influence over life on Earth that goes beyond merely thrilling or chilling us. Its best-known effect, of course, is that on the sea. Though relatively small in size, by adding its own gravitational pull to the Sun’s, the Moon creates bulges in the oceans as the Earth rotates, thus creating tides.
But it has also had a profound impact on our psyche. In the Western Isles, the Neolithic Calanais Stones served to celebrate a lunar event that must have seemed mystical and perhaps frightening. Every 18.6 years, rather than setting in the conventional manner, the Moon there appears to scoot along the southern horizon. It then vanishes, only to show its face again soon afterwards.
More recently, in medieval times, stained-glass window-makers added a face to the Moon, reflecting the belief that it had an influence over the affairs of humankind.
LUNAR MADNESS
And that influenc
