It will ‘take years’ to fully clear damage from previous storms – National Trust

It will “take years” to clear up the damage from storms that rocked the north east of Scotland four years ago, the National Trust for Scotland has said as it reflected on the progress made to restore felled trees.

Storm Arwen brought severe winds across the north east of Scotland in November 2021 with the Met Office issuing a red warning for wind.

Storm Corrie arrived in January 2022 which 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 while the trust felt this year they had completed their storm response it will “take years” to clear up the amount of fallen trees.

He said: “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.

“In other words, we’ve done a lot of the restabilisation. 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.

Mr Wardle said during Storm Arwen the majority of the damage was done in the space of an hour.

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 campaigns were launched 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 from both the Storm Appeal and the Dedicate a Tree campaign for the North East specifically.

Over spring 2024 alone the trust managed to plant 79,305 trees across three sites covering around 50 hectares.

In the past four years since Arwen and Corrie there has been a plethora of other storm events that 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.

“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 appeals as it now faces storms in winter and wildfires in summer that need extensive clear-up.

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.”