Eyam, Derbyshire Feb - March 2023:
As you can see from the picture, storm Otto didn't go lightly on the high ground of Eyam. The owners of the property had long worried about the tree's safety in high winds. Unfortunately, approval hadn't been forthcoming as the tree was under a conservation order and couldn't be touched.
And then it happened. The 300 year old house, its main roof, kitchen lean-to and conservatory taking the brunt. It was as dramatic a scene as a tree surgeon can expect to be called out to.
It's worth mentioning that Luke Jones of Aussie Tree Care was first to the scene. He then called upon myself to join him to begin cutting the tree away from both ON and IN the house. Over 3 days of careful extraction and endless sawing, the house was tree-free while the lime was reduced to sections of wood, piles of brash and huge stump.
Fast forward just over a month. Finally some pleasant weather and myself and Nick Avery were back in Eyam to turn the lime tree into firewood. Nick, a retired police, set up his splitter and we spent 8 hours tirelessly loading the lime chunks onto it, generating a prodigious quantity of great logs, ready to be stacked and dried for countless winters ahead.
In the end, all that remained were the huge piles of firewood and a 1.8m section of the main trunk which in time will be turned into a bench!
It was a huge relief for the clients, David and Gwyneth, who had seen their house and garden in such a state of abuse over the prior weeks. Instead they now had the silver lining to the clouds left by storm Otto...firewood, and lots of it!
Now I've got to get started on that bench :)
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