A generation on from the Great Storm of 1987, Oliver Bullough finds there is much to cheer about the 100 mile-an-hour winds which devastated southern woodlands.

Steve Scott walked through Rendlesham forest on the morning after the Great Storm of 1987. The worst was already over but the 23-year-old still had to fight his way through the wall of air. He wasn’t quite sure what he was doing there, but he saw history being made.

Twenty years on, the same road runs dead straight between neat rows of teenage Corsican Pine. These are set back a little, leaving a verge to be colonised by a few oaks, more birches and a lot of gorse. You could never imagine what Scott saw that day.

“I was walking down this road, and all of these trees were flattened. You would never guess anything had happened looking at it now,” says Scott, now the Forestry Commission’s Regional Director for eastern England. Stopping the car, he points out an area of open heath to the right. It had been a depot where a haulage company kept its containers.

“These containers, which must have weighed two or three tonnes, were just rolling past across the road and I had to time my run past to miss them. That was the most dangerous part,” he says.

A few containers are still there, rusting into the heath. One was crushed as if by a giant fist – one of the few remaining signs of the devastation 20 years ago.

An occasional Scots Pine towers over the newly planted forest. Mostly they are in groups of four of five, sometimes they are all alone. They are the only survivors of the stands that once dominated this flat land and the only reminders that trees here should be many metres tall.

Suffolk’s Rendlesham, together with the two neighbouring areas of woodland that make up the Sandlings Forest, lost a million trees on the night of 15-16 October, 1987. That was the equivalent of more than a decade’s felling in a single night. When Scott finally made it to the Forestry Commission’s office in the forest, 60-year-old old veterans of the forest were weeping at the sight of it.

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