"For my part," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey, "I travel, not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." And even more famously, Stevenson remarked elsewhere that "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive".
Edward Cooper had very similar inclinations. As a young man in the early 1820s he travelled extensively in the Middle East and Africa, taking in Persia and Turkey, and negotiating the Nile in Egypt as far as Wadi Haffa; later he traversed the whole of Scandinavia, even to the extent of reaching the North Cape, the nearest point on mainland Europe to the pole.
But Cooper's travel madness had some method in it; throughout his journeyings he made a practice of regularly observing his latitude and longitude, and by this means he became a proficient astronomical observer.
Edward Cooper was born in 1798, the scion of an ancient family who had received their lands in Co Sligo in the 17th century as a reward for military service to the Crown. By Edward's time the Coopers were well established at Markree Castle near Collooney; they were progressive farmers and improving landlords, and, like many of their class around that time, they dabbled as amateurs in many of the sciences.
With his travelling days behind him, Edward Cooper took over the Markree Castle estates in 1830 on the death of his father, and in the years that followed he established there one of the best-equipped astronomical observatories in Europe. More importantly for meteorologists, however, Edward Cooper ensured a place in history for Markree Castle as a weather station whose meteorological records were to be unrivalled in their duration anywhere in the west of Ireland, and rarely equalled in the country generally.
Observations had, in fact, begun in 1824, but the readings were sporadic; under Edward Cooper's stewardship, however, a faultless series of daily readings was produced, lasting from 1833 to 1863.
Edward Cooper died 135 years ago today, on April 23rd, 1863. Unfortunately, his successor, his nephew Lieut-Col Edward Henry Cooper, had little interest in either astronomy or weather. The observatory has long since been dismantled, the only part of it remaining being the massive stonework to support the telescopes. But the meteorology continued - albeit sporadically during the tenure of Edward Henry, which lasted until 1874 - and from 1875 onwards a complete, continuous record of the daily weather at Collooney is available, right up until the present day. It is the only series of weather observations from the west of Ireland that lasts for longer than a century.