A boss at one of Aberdeenshire’s most popular walking spots has said she does not think it will return to its pre-Storm Arwen state “in my lifetime”.
Around 100,000 trees at Haddo House and Country Park were toppled in the extreme winds at the end of last month, making the site too dangerous for visitors to access before 2022.
The historic building at the centre of the National Trust for Scotland property was largely undamaged after the storm, but will not reopen until next year.
Suzanna Atkinson, the visitor services officer at Haddo House, told the BBC she believed the full recovery of the forest is far in the future.
She said: “Unfortunately that’s not going to happen in my lifetime. We’re going to spend the next few months clearing as best we can.
“But we also need to have a consultation with Scottish Forestry to make sure that whatever we put back into Haddo is exactly what we need for biodiversity and habitat as well.”
Storm toppled 100 acres of trees
She said 100,000 trees would need to be replanted, across 100 acres of forest flattened by Storm Arwen.
To help towards the cost of the recovery efforts, a £50,000 fundraising campaign was launched last week on JustGiving.
The page says: “This will take years to complete, but we will do it in phases so we can reopen.
“What we need to do is start growing native trees so that we have something to plant when the time comes. It takes years to grow an oak tree sapling, for example, so we must start now.”
Among the historic trees left standing after the storm is the enormous old beech tree, located on the approach to the pheasantry – but others were not so lucky.
NTS landscape manager Chris Wardle said: “We’ve lost a lot of plantation forestry but we have lost a lot of big, old, either historic trees or trees that are part of the landscape that really add something to the diversity and the ecological landscape of where we are.”
He also said the storm had caused “disruption to the wider environment that we just don’t know yet”, including to badgers who start their breeding cycle at this time of year.