Well, we go away for a couple of days and all hell lets loose! While we were in Norfolk this area has had a really tough time. The electric to the whole area went off on Wednesday night and our village was off for 17 hours, but some places were only just getting their power back yesterday evening. We went to the pub when we got back yesterday and everyone was saying how horrendous the wind had been - worse than any of them could ever remember. A builder friend said he'd lost several ridge tiles on his roof and they in turn had cracked quite a few of the other tiles on their way down and he said when he went to the roofing place to get replacements he couldn't get in the carpark they were so busy! Lots of big trees have fallen down - our road home was blocked by a tree that had fallen onto a hump-back bridge (guess they have to check the structural integrity of the bridge before they can re-open the road). The road between here and Oswestry had also been closed by a huge tree and there are whole trees, branches and tops all over the place in the fields around - the chainsaws will be busy! Just along the lane from us a couple of big trees have fallen very neatly behind the fence on the quarry's land (so not causing any problems) and apparently Phil and Ann were walking past when one of them fell. That must have been a truly awesome sight (and I mean that in the proper sense rather than the teenage over-exaggerated sense). I've never seen a whole tree fall down naturally.
We have been lucky in that we have only had small branches and bits of tree fall down and none of it has done any damage. We just had to gather up recycling boxes, bits of wood and the canoe and put them back in their rightful places. After the tales in the pub we inspected our roof very carefully in the daylight today and thankfully everything is intact . . . we obviously did a decent job of it, phew! My nice tidy lane that I spent ages clearing was completely covered in branches and debris - aarghhh!!
Our journey to Norfolk was quite interesting from the flood-damage point of view. We crossed the River Severn in two places and it was totally unrecognisable - about a mile wide! Yet the river at Oundle which we've seen flooded a few times was not really too bad and we've seen it much worse. When we crossed the fens we actually saw a farmer ploughing his field - I doubt there are many farmers in the country can do that at the moment. I guess though that shows the benefits of careful land management. There are ditches and dykes round every field in the fens and they are well maintained by the farmers because they know that the land is reclaimed from the sea and could very easily return to the sea if they don't. I'm assuming that the Somerset Levels which are in a similar position have not had the same time and effort spent on them.
The chickens seem to have survived on their own through the exciting weather without any problems. Peggy doesn't look so much like a penguin, Horse is still laying, there were no Lottie eggs (which makes us think we probably won't find a big pile of rotting eggs under a bush somewhere which is good) and Dot is just Dot.
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