Burned Out

July 20 we could see a forest fire developing a few kilometres away. It burned for a few days and finally was extinguished by the professional and volunteer firefighters, helped by a night of rain.
Today I decided to walk up to where I thought the fire had been burning, to see how it all looked.
It looked pretty horrible! The peaty soil is very thin on the hills and basically it had burned right away. Before the fire this would have been covered with bilberry bushes, heather, shrubs and mosses. Now it's all gone and only rock and ash is left.
Most of these smaller trees have burned up completely and are still standing. In other areas (extra) the trees were bigger. I had expected to see burnt trees but so many of these larger trees have fallen. The fire has burned away the roots and the soil and then the trees have just fallen over!
In one way it is depressing to see all this damage but it will also be interesting to see how the landscape develops and recovers over the next few years.
It ended up  as an 11 km walk - not so far but the burned area was tricky to walk around in and there was also a couple of kilometres of wild forest to navigate through.  When I got home my legs and ankles felt very tired!