The Tree Pathway

Storms

A "Directors cut" from England in Particular – a celebration of the local, the vernacular and the distinctive. (Sue Clifford and Angela King. Hodder & Stoughton, 2006). This is one of a number of essays that 'fell at the last hurdle' and did not make it into the book.

“A little after midnight came a strange sound from over the sea, and high overhead the air began to carry a strange, faint, hollow booming./Then without warning the tempest broke. With a rapidity which, at the time, seemed incredible, and even afterwards is impossible to realize, the whole aspect of nature at once became convulsed. The waves rose in growing fury, each overtopping its fellow, till in a very few minutes the lately glassy sea was like a roaring devouring monster”. In a long fictional description of a storm and the wrecking of a ‘foreign schooner’ in Whitby Harbour Bram Stoker introduces Dracula, in the form of a great dog, to the shores of Yorkshire.

Reality is yet more terrifying. On the morning of 16th October 1987 people of the south and east of England, had they managed to sleep, awoke to devastation. Great swathes of Kentish and Chiltern woods were down, in the metropolis unprecedented mayhem rendered quietness, no traffic could move, even some of the resilient London Planes were scattered across the railings and roads of Bloomsbury. Seven Oaks in Kent lost its namesake trees, 90% of the county’s roads were blocked by trees and power lines. Ancestral heronries lost their support in Norfolk. Roofs were found in fields, cars were squashed by walls. Following so closely on Hurricane Floyd in Florida and the proximity to the media meant that this attack on civilization received prime coverage. Winds of 85 mph were recorded, 19 people were killed, 19 million trees felled. The trees suffered so badly because they were still in leaf, although contrary to popular expectations those that fell were those recently reaching maturity, ancient trees suffered least. The planted Scots and Corsican pines of Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk were extensively damaged whilst the thousands of ancient oaks at its centre in Staverton Park hardly lost a bough. Likewise planted trees were more liable to uprooting than wild trees.

In 1990 25th January, 47 people lost their lives in a daytime storm, 5 million trees were blown down. Further gales and cold followed for a month. In 2002 Saturday 27th October brought 90 mph winds, 7 people died, power and transport were disrupted, trees were once more the focus of negative attention. We seem to be experiencing once in a hundred year storms with increasing frequency and as Paul Evans pointed out in the Guardian in 2002 “Forests give storms something to bite into and trees can protect habitation, towns and cities, rather than be seen as a threat to them. …Storm damaged trees are the trees which kill people, destroy property, disrupt services. This is not an argument for having fewer trees but one for having more and being smarter about how we care for trees and woodland. We can no longer protect the nature we like from the nature we don’t. We had better learn to live with the storms, the way the woods have.”

Great storms make their way into folklore and history books. Snow, hail, wind, rain, thunder, flood are all brought by storms. On 15 Jan 1362 Norwich Cathedral lost its spire, 31 Jan 1953 coincident conditions in the North Sea brought terrible inundation down the east coast of England. 1947 and 1962/3 stick in the memories of those who had to cope with the snow and in 1981/2 the blizzards seemed to rage for days and covered much of England with deep drifts which in White Rocks, Herefordshire locked people in for 9 days. In Newport, Shropshire they enjoyed the lowest ever recorded temperature of –26.1*C (10 January 1982). The Great Storm is the name accorded to the combination of extreme low pressure and high tides which brought terrible floods to East Anglia and Lincolnshire in 1953.

Daniel Defoe experienced one of the worst natural events in our history in November 1703, he documented it in ‘The Storm’. In the Thames, a ‘prodigious’ spring tide coincided with the worst of the storm, ships were blown from their moorings and many were driven “down into the Bite, as the sailors call it, from Bell Wharf to Limehouse; where they were huddled together and drove on shore, heads and sterns, one upon the other, in such a manner, as any one would have thought it impossible: and the damage done on that account was incredible”. In some parts of England the water is said to have risen 6-8 feet higher than anyone had ever known. The crescendo of the autumn storm on 27 November afflicted boats in Plymouth, Gravesend, Yarmouth, Hull and Newcastle. Some estimated that between 8,000 and 30,000 seamen were lost and 300 ships; the ‘Restoration’ a naval vessel floundered on the Goodwin Sands and she alone lost 386 men. The Eddystone Light, off Plymouth, was halved in height, Stowmarket in Suffolk lost its church spire, Northampton lost 3 windmills, Ely several, 400 were lost in all some to fire caused by friction, haystacks, houses and apple and elm trees were snatched out by the roots in Somerset, the New Forest lost 4000 trees, cattle and sheep died and those 20 miles inland found salty grass unpalatable.

In 1979 on the 14 August a terrible storm blew up 3 days after the yachts had set off from the Isle of Wight in the Fastnet Race. Near the Fastnet Rock out in the Atlantic strangely furious seas upturned 75 boats, sank five and drowned 15 sailors.

It is the oceans, increasing in temperature with climate change, that are generating the conditions for the increasing numbers and intensities of storms. Paradoxically we are all now “in peril on the sea”.

Back to the 'Great Storm' of 1987