Air-borne Corrugated Iron and more

My brother, Mark, took his family to Galway and Connemara in the summer of 2011 and, among the rest of his always beautiful and scenic holiday snaps was a picture of a porta-cabin type caravan on a rocky hilltop near the coast. The cabin had attracted his attention because it was lashed to the ground by two massive guy ropes, one long-ways and one side to side. The ropes looked as thick at ship hawsers and they were fixed to the ground by massive ground anchors of the sort used by the telecoms people to anchor the guys on telegraph poles. How we laughed (as they say) and commented on whether they might be expecting a bit of wind. If I can borrow the pic from Mark, I will post it here.

We are a bit inland from Galway here so we don't see the full brunt of Atlantic gales but we do get some fierce winds and we try to make sure everything is well fixed down. Yesterday as the snow melted and the temperature rose, the wind swung round through westerly to the NNW and suddenly increased in strength. Coming from that direction is the only time it hits the house and outbuildings WITHOUT being first filtered through our stands of huge black spruce, blasting in from Sligo and Clew Bay. We knew it was getting up when it started to move my 2CV Trailer, pushing it along our cattle race till I put it back and chocked the wheels.

We were indoors, fed and watered and watching a bit of TV when we heard a thump and the dogs all went ballistic. The stack of old cut-up floor boards I use for kindling, stacked against one of the cattle race walls, had been kept dry by 2 curved sheets of corrugated iron about 7 feet long (part of the roof of our former Dutch barn), held down by a 6 inch concrete block which I struggle to lift. The whole structure is now inside the big rabbit run and has been adopted by the rabbits who burrow around under and through it and actually like to climb up the slope of the sheeting to give them a high viewpoint.

A gust of wind must have managed to get under this sheeting and hoyed it up and over the wall with the concrete block still on it. The thump was the block landing in the cattle race. One sheet landed in the race and stayed there to leeward of the wall but the other went completely air-borne, passing through the kitchen garden and out onto the front lawn (about 50 metres we estimate) where it landed convex side up and dug in, making an impressive slash in the grass. Luckily no-one got in the way - that could have given someone a nasty cut or other injury. The rabbit hutch roof was also flipped up by the wind, so the poor bunnies were homeless.

Well, we were out there in coats and hats with torches for a good half hour rounding up the sheets and creating a temporary shelter, handling the sheeting very carefully and wedging everything down more securely to give the rabbits somewhere to take cover from the wind. All the loose stuff we stowed to leeward of the house where we could sort it out in the morning.

The only other wind related damage we can see is that a branch on one of our big trees had now sagged and is twanging off the telephone/broadband cable. Now if there's a service to this house that we would hate to lose (we'd almost trade electric lighting, water and a few trees blocking the drive rather than lose broadband!) it is that. It is too high for us to reach it and Telecom Éireann will not touch it if is our tree on our property, so we had to get on the phone to our old chum Aerial Keith (he of 3rd Jan last year, who took down our old saggy TV aerial and cleared the gutters) who will come out and do tree surgery for us.

Finally, I was delighted to get my 2CV club magazine this month as it contains my own article about the adventures of moving the 2CV from Kent to here, exporting it and re-registering it as Irish. Liz is now calling me "the acclaimed author and journalist, Matt C". Fame at last!