With Storm Arwen on the way, we decided to go for a walk before battening down the hatches. By the time we set out the sky was turning purple, and far-off clouds of snow could be seen racing towards the hills. The wind was picking up, but when we reached the forest we felt sheltered.

A couple of hours later it would not have felt as safe. As we stomped along the trail, the first snow of the season began to fall, drifting sideways through the pines. It is always a moment to enjoy, when the woods turn into a scene from Narnia.

By the next day, the route we had taken resembled a logging camp. Dozens of trees had come down during the night. At the entrance to Hoolet, two had been cleared off the road before breakfast. The copse on the Common was a giant game of skittles, with pitched trees and severed boughs hanging half-suspended over the path. Only Hoolet’s bravest, with their chainsaws, dared to enter.

Along the edge of the hills – I didn’t venture into the forest – countless pines had been toppled. Taking their shallow roots with them, they looked like a scattering of upended sink plungers. On one short stretch, eight had crashed into the fields opposite. With their boughs on one side of the road, and their roots on the other, they were like a magician’s assistant who has been sawn in two, leaving empty air in the middle. The morning after the storm, the sound of hammering and sawing filled the village as people started repairs. We were fortunate. I half expected to find the crab-apple snapped in two, or the summerhouse blown away, but astonishingly they, and everything else, had clung on. Only a heavy ceramic pot was broken, dashed to pieces as if it were an egg-cup.

The night of the storm we slept in the loft, where there is no chimney to howl. We had no idea of the power cuts others were enduring only a mile away.

As I write, thousands across the country are still without electricity, and others have no running water either. One friend who was without power over the weekend passed the time playing Monopoly with the kids by candlelight. This is what it was like when I was young, he told them. They were not impressed.

Stories from those stranded and half-frozen have been a reminder of how vulnerable country folk can be, reliant on powerlines and cables that are worryingly susceptible to falling trees, ice and snow. Even a Galashiels fire engine came under attack when a tree crushed its rear end, thankfully missing the crew.

Some years before we arrived, Hoolet went without electricity for five days. Like Christmas paperchains, powerlines had sagged beneath the weight of snow, before collapsing. These days, when the wind rages or the snow deepens, it is comforting to know the cables lie underground.

The clear-up operation around here has been swift, and although there will be gaping holes in gardens and woods, the place will look much as it ever did. I was distressed to read, however, about John Muir Country Park at Hedderwick, near Dunbar, which was devastated by the storm. Over 3,000 trees were brought down, leaving something resembling a wasteland.

Aerial footage of the aftermath is shocking. In places the woods are flattened, single pines standing like flagpoles amid a sea of devastation that looks like the wake of hurricanes in the Caribbean. So few are left intact that the impact on wildlife will be sore. Even around Hoolet, which got off lightly, I can’t help wondering about the creatures whose roosts, dreys and burrows lie in ruins.

In the direct path of the storm, the John Muir woods stretch along eight miles of coastline, some of it dunes, and the soil in which they grow is sandy and light. As a youngster, even before it became a country park, it was one of my regular haunts. It was here I saw my first kingfisher, a rainbow flash that made it feel that for a nanosecond I had been transported to the tropics. Hours could pass wandering between woods and sea, with a friend or dog for company, or sitting by the river’s edge.

Often, I would wonder about the French prisoners of war who were put to work out here during the Napoleonic wars. Did any decide to stay after they were released? Are there descendants of these soldiers in East Lothian even now? I lived a mile or so away, in Belhaven, which today is almost as famous for its surfing as for its beer. As a student, when home for the holidays, I would join my father, who went jogging several times a week, criss-crossing the woodland trails.

At first I was reluctant, but in time the charm of the location overcame the drag of making an effort, and the mortification of being less fit than my dad. And the great thing about the woods was that – in those days – hardly anybody was ever there, which meant that, unlike when pounding the pavements, there was no need to feel embarrassed about turning puce.

If nothing else, Storm Arwen has emphasised the fragility of our wild spaces, showing how in a matter of hours the familiar can be ripped away, leaving an alien landscape. Few things are worse than going without heating, light or water for days on end. People’s ordeal makes you appreciate how wholly unprepared most of us are for basic survival. In the countryside, meantime, nature is more resilient, and soon revives. No bird is ever without a perch come night-time, and already the shoots that were crowded out by the dense canopy overhead will be reaching upwards.

In a bid to help regeneration, a team of Hoolet volunteers headed out to the Common the afternoon after the storm, armed with spades and hammers. A grant-aided consignment of trees and bushes had arrived, and needed to be planted. While I set about sorting the garden, Alan joined the diggers. In less than two hours they had plugged gaps with 200 or more crab apples, hawthorns and other berry-bearing species. These infant saplings, in their protective tubes, are just what’s needed, after seeing so much laid to waste.