After the storm
The storm that brought such heavy rain to the west coast of Scotland last weekend was not given a name! Yet has caused absolute havoc with landslides and floods on every road out of Oban. The flooding has now subsided so access to Oban is open again on certain routes. But the landslides will take longer to clear.
Floods on the farm
Prolonged periods of heavy rain are not good! The farm track has a loose surface and we spend a lot of time maintaining it. Clearing drainage channels on the steeper bits, shovelling type ‘one’ into the potholes.. then along comes the rain and washes it all away again.
We had two nasty surprises on Sunday morning when Somerset went to feed the young sheep in the shed and discovered a blocked ditch had flooded half the shed floor. He had to move the sheep outside again and clear the blockages. Luckily he had Arran helping him, many hands, light(er) work. All in the pouring rain! The second surprise was the second time in nearly thirty years that one of the cottages had a slight ingress of water. Thankfully the guest hadn’t arrived and it was sorted out before she got here! Again another ditch cleared and it shouldn’t happen again for another 20 years..
On the beach
On Saturday afternoon, when the rain had eased off, we went for a walk with Coco at Calgary. I am fascinated by how the beach is changing, and wanted to see what had happened after the storm. It was too windy and damp to fly the drone, but we walked over to the burn and could see where the torrents of rainwater had eaten into the sand, cutting right back in towards the marram and the machair beyond as you can see in the photograph below. The brown vegetation is the Sea rocket dying back. This is a relatively new addition to the beach, and we wonder if it has perhaps always been here but the sheep that used to graze the beach kept it at bay?
These photographs
The first one of the photographs in this post show how the passage of the burn across the sands moves across the beach according the weather and the tides. The second was after a storm in July. The third and fourth were taken yesterday after the storm at the weekend. The combination of excessive rainwater off the hill, the tides and the wind direction has cut into the bank. I love the colour of the water, stained by peat from the hill and decaying seaweed washed in by the tide.
