Donegal dairy farmer Brook Wylie has been cut off from public roads since Tuesday night when flash floods swept away two bridges close to his 160ac farm.

He has no idea when the bridges will be repaired.

Until the bridges are fixed, a 40ac block of the farm at Carnamoyle, Muff, cannot be grazed, so his cows have to go back out on fields they grazed only days ago if they are dry enough.

Neither can Wylie move any of his machinery to cut silage or the eight acres of barley that he grows.

One of the two bridges destroyed by flash flooding on the Wylie farm in Donegal.

The Aurivo milk truck is just about able to access his farm through a quarry at the rear of the farm.

“It’s very rough, you wouldn’t get a car through there and it’s a fair squeeze for the truck to get round the bend in the quarry.”

“I have no idea when the bridge will be repaired,” he told the Irish Farmers Journal.

“They are two minor, secondary roads so there will be a lot of work done on main roads before they get to us.”

Fields are strewn with rocks and flood debris, including trees.

Worst ever seen

The weather last Tuesday night was the worst he has ever seen.

“It started around 3pm and it never stopped. We got 70mm to 80mm in only eight or nine hours,” he recalled.

“It was at its worst around 9.30pm. We crossed the bridge at the bottom of our lane around that time and the water was up level with the wall – but there is normally a five foot drop down to the field.

“The river had already burst into the field at that stage and within 30 minutes it took the hedge and then the bridge away.”

This bank of stones has been left behind in the middle of a field after the flood.

Silt and rocks

Now large portions of his fields are strewn with silt, rocks and flood debris, with the soil waterlogged.

A smaller stream running close to the farmyard flooded into the slatted tank in the cow shed for a period during the worst rain.

While all of Wylie’s livestock and fodder were safe, his neighbours were not so lucky.

Stranded heifers

“Heifers on a neighbour’s farm got stranded and they had to swim across the river. They went in one by one and got swept downstream a fair bit before they reappeared,” the farm recalled. “They were in-calf heifers.

“Another man had all his bales taken away by the flood.”

Brook farms with his parents David and Louise, who had to go back a long way to recall such extreme weather.

“My father says the last time there was anything like this was in 1985 but I’ve never seen anything as bad as this.”

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