A Baptism of Wind

The first Atlantic storm of the winter battered Mingary Castle and surrounding area last night and this morning, with gale force winds which destroyed power lines, brought trees down, and left the peninsula without both land line and mobile telephone signal.  Over 24mm (an inch) of a mixture of rain, sleet, hail and snow fell in twenty-four hours.  To make matters worse, high water of a spring tide coincided with the peak of the gale, at about seven this morning.  It was a chance for John Forsyth's scaffolding to show whether it could survive a full Highland storm.

It acquitted itself magnificently.  The only damage was when about ten of the scaffolding boards along the top walkway ripped through the ropes which held them to the poles, but even then they didn't come down.  It will only take John-Paul Ashley's men a few minutes to fix them.

Of more concern than the wind was the fear that a high tide, pushed along by a westerly gale, would bring seaweed and flotsam against the base of the scaffolding on the beach to the west of the castle.  This would have given the waves much more drag against the base of the scaffolding, which might have brought the whole thing down.  The seaweed came in, a length of rope wrapped itself round some of the poles, and a tree trunk narrowly missed the structure, but it has stood up to this first test.