The Storm Rages On

At a quarter to ten last night, with the storm raging as fiercely as ever, the power went off, not a clean break but a dozen on-offs-on-offs perfectly designed to wreck electrical goods.  While houses beyond Glenborrodale were reconnected by midnight, some 300+ homes at this end of the peninsula stayed off until almost one this afternoon.

Part of the delay was because the engineers at Scottish and Southern, who have worked so hard in impossible conditions, had to be pulled off the job because the gale had started to bring in a mixture of snow, sleet and rain, mixed in with lightning. The fault was sufficiently serious for SSE to bring in generators, but a lorry carrying one of them was reported to have jack-knifed in the early hours of the morning - which isn't surprising as, when I got up at four, there was a one-inch covering of snow across the landscape, almost all of which had gone by morning.

This afternoon, with the storm as fierce as ever, the Raptor and I drove out to Ardnamurchan Point lighthouse. Compared to the Sound of Mull, top picture, which is in the lee of Ardnamurchan, the Point was exposed to the full anger of the Atlantic, so the huge waves coming in....

....were smashed to foam against the dark rocks. To stand straight in the gale was almost impossible, and the whole of the Point was covered in driving, salty spray, yet there were moments....

Picture courtesy the Raptor

....when the Small Isles emerged along the horizon.

The winds are finally beginning to ease. We're promised a calm-ish day tomorrow, before another severe storm arrives in the early hours of Monday morning.