Last night we had the most severe winter storm that we've had for a while. Winds reportedly reached over 80mph. Other than having to rescue the wheelie bins, there's no damage here at The Barn - the landscape is pretty storm-proof, old buildings are low and heavily built, and modern houses are designed to take the weather.
But there are trees on Skye - lots of them in places. We have quite a few round The Barn, but all the ones here are still stranding this morning, waving their branches in the wind! They were noisy in the night though - almost drowning out the frequent claps of thunder...!!
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| Roskhill Barn - a summer photo (the sky is a bit more grey today...) |
The Skye moorland is generally bare of vegetation taller than heather and myrtle. But the many burns draining off the moorland often cut deep gorges, and the shelter the gorge provides permits the growth of taller plants, and tough little trees are usually found too -
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| A typical Skye moorland gorge - in winter |
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| At the foot of a typical Skye gorge - in summer. The moorland above here is just grass, heather and moss. |
And we have some woodland, even here in the exposed north west of the island. We usually walk Cupar at least once a day in the woods above Dunvegan Castle - planted in the late 1800s. There is a variety of trees in the woods, including many beech and a few oak and chestnut, but in the most exposed parts, it is the sycamore which seems best able to cope with the weather.
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| Dunvegan Woods... |
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| ...one of Cupar's favourite places ! |
Skye also has a number of forestry plantations - dense rows of spruce, larch and pine. The closely planted trees support each other, so only a few round the edges of the plantations are ever affected by the wind. It's unusual to find a path in a plantation though - this one is above the Aros Centre in Portree (and it's an old photo - that's Basil, not Cupar).
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| Basil in Portree Forest |
Of course, trees do blow down sometimes. It seldom kills them though. If left alone, they soon sort-out which direction is the new 'up' and just carry on growing....
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| Horizontal Scots Pine at Lyndale, Skye |
In compiling this post, I have found many more of our tree photos around Skye, which I will put together into a new post on my Skye in Pictures blog -
http://pictureskye.blogspot.co.uk/
2 comments:
Wonderful photos of trees and moorlands there!
When my mother and I stayed near Greshornish in 2006 we experienced gale force winds one night. Our bedrooms were upstairs and we were both a little nervous at the sound of the strong wind outside our windows that we ended up spending the rest of the night on the couch and chair in the living room. I'm sure the house was very sturdy but we couldn't sleep through the storm!
Hello Jill, I understand what you mean. Storms at night are much more frightening than in the daylight.
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