Hurricane Winds Bring Trees Down

Today the South West of Ireland experienced hurricane strength winds with gusts of 100mph.

I tweeted this:

When the storm had finally abated, we ventured out to see if any trees had been blown over. They had!

First was quite close by, at the corner of ‘The Pen’ and ‘Parc i dán’ where three trees and the ground under them were pulled up, bringing the sheep fence down and exposing the bottoms of the fence posts:

Next we went over to the ‘Cnocán’ (the field in front of the house where the two remaining pet lambs live) and at the bottom, two trees had toppled over, bringing up the sheep wire:

Just along from those two, a large tree was blown over into my neighbour’s field! Who gets to take a chainsaw to it under these circumstances?

In the same section of the field, following the drain/hedge along, west, a large alder fell down into the field, bringing the sheep fence with it:

Just a little further west, where the green grassy field becomes rougher ‘fináin’ two huge sitka spruce trees fell, bringing a 10ft bank of earth with it and once again, bringing down the fence:

Down the very bottom of the Cnocán, near the ‘Sough’ a large ‘Sally’ (Sallow) tree fell; naturally on top of the sheep fence:

and a tall oak tree was torn limb from limb:

West in Baurearagh, looking over the fence into my neighbour Coillte (the Irish Forestry Commission) I can see that several small sitka spruce have been toppled, domino-fashion:

On the western side of my own field in ‘Bons’ a large and sprawling ‘sally’ (Sallow) has split in a couple of places, narrowly missing the wire for once:

And lastly, back in the ‘pen’, a Hawthorne (white thorn) was blown over, up-rooting a couple of fence posts as it did so:

So it looks as though we will have plenty of wood for the fire, and will be quite busy repairing several different stretches of fence for the foreseeable future!

While the storm was raging, I took a short video of the huge, 60-70ft tall sitka spruce trees at the back of the garden, behind the house. Mercifully they stayed upright as the polytunnel would have been squashed:

A few days later, the clean-up began, and the repair work to fences. We sawed through the vast sitka spruce trees and re-joined the sheep wire fence. To our astonishment, the following morning, we discovered that they had righted themselves again; standing upright, the ground returned to where it ought to be!