Storms Arwen and Corrie tree damage could ‘take years to clear’ | UK News

The National Trust for Scotland has warned it could “take years” to clear up the damage from two storms which battered the country in 2021.

Storm Arwen brought severe winds across the north east in November 2021 after the Met Office issued a red warning for wind.

Two months later, Storm Corrie brought further damaging winds, with gusts reaching 91mph at Inverbervie weather station in Aberdeenshire.

The damage from the storms could be seen all along the area with flooding and power outages reported.

Tens of thousands of trees were felled throughout the north east, the Highlands, and Argyll and Bute.

The storms devastated hundreds of acres of natural heritage – the equivalent of 20 Murrayfield Stadiums.

Chris Wardle, the National Trust for Scotland’s gardens and designed landscape manager for Aberdeenshire and Angus, said progress had been made but there was still much to do.

He added: “This year, which was 2025, that’s four years on, is the first year that I felt that we were in a good place.

“Finally, where we were our disaster response had kind of completed itself.

“We cleared a lot of the fallen trees up. We still haven’t done all of that, that will take years just because the sheer volume of where the trees fell over and locations.”

In north east Scotland the trust has nine sites, six of which were largely affected during the storms – Crathes, Drum, Craigievar, Fyvie, Leith Hall and Castle Fraser.

During Storm Arwen Mr Wardle said the majority of the damage was done in minutes.

He said: “The best way to give it a little bit of context is one of our sites, which was Craigievar, we lost basically 60% of the tree cover in about one hour.”

The trust launched the Dedicate a Tree campaign in December 2023 along with the Storm Appeal.

Both initiatives were designed to support replanting the hundreds of thousands of trees across Aberdeenshire lost to Storms Arwen and Corrie.

Since 2022, the trust has raised £202,613 for both the Storm Appeal and the Dedicate a Tree campaign for the north east specifically.

And in spring last year the trust managed to plant 79,305 trees across three sites covering around 50 hectares.

In the years since Arwen and Corrie a number of other storm events have rocked the north east.

Mr Wardle said the trust now has to contend with the effects of climate change-related weather.

He said: “It’s not like it was like it happened and we can just make it better and move on.

“It’s like we do a bit and then something else comes along and has another go at us.”

The Storm Appeal and Dedicate a Tree campaigns were also used to protect the rare and endemic Arran Whitebeam at Glen Rosa on Arran.

This proved important in spring 2025 when thousands of trees in Glen Rosa were lost to a wildfire.

Mr Wardle said: “Now we’re getting to a situation where a storm comes along in the winter, they push the trees over.

“That’s fuel that’s lying on the ground and then we’re having a summer event that’s very, very late this year, very, very warm and dry and then the wildfire risk goes up.”

Thanks to the added threat of climate change-related weather the trust is continuing its fundraising to help it cope with the demands of extreme conditions.

Mr Wardle said: “Although the original storm appeal was to do with Arwen and Corrie we’ve had continuing storms, and these put a financial pressure on us constantly because we don’t have endless resources.

“So we have to respond to it.”