Scots enjoy April sun but campers airlifted to safety after forest fire

SCOTLAND is eyeing up a blinking good record after already running up more than half the sunshine total for the whole of April 2024.

- By Paul Drury

But there is a downside to this type of weather wildfires.

Terrified campers had to be airlifted to safety when they were caught up in one such blaze.

The incident illustrated just how dangerous the current situation is as blazes continue to break out across large parts of the country.

The campers were winched to safety after a car which they had arrived in was spotted by emergency services.

Yesterday, they recalled their horror at being caught up in the fire.

Bruce Marbrow and his son Jack, 13, had travelled from Yorkshire with friend Scott Rayner and his son Frankie, 13, to camp in the Galloway Forest Park on Friday.

When they saw smoke in the distance, the campers attributed it to the controlled burning of heather, not realising the flames were from a wildfire.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service said it was alerted to a fire spreading across a large area of grass north of Loch Dee, at about 4pm on Thursday.

However, at midnight on Friday the campers saw flames getting closer.

Mr Marbrow told The Scotsman newspaper: "By midnight, the fire was raging down the side of the hill where we were.

"At about 1am, we thought: 'What do we do? Do we try and walk off the hill?'. We decided to stay up until daybreak.

"The fire was 20 metres away from where we were camped. It was a proper inferno on the side of the hill."

He added: "Never in a million years did we think the smoke we'd seen in the distance would be a wildfire like this."