White marks dotted the roof of the house and pockmarked the lawn surrounding it. Windows enclosing the outdoor area were smashed, as were windows in the kitchen, living room, study and shed. There were holes in the blinds and dents in the venetians in the living room because of the hail.

The wind pulled up sections of the roof and ripped the television antenna from the pole.

Their yard was covered in broken tree branches and leaves, and when Mr Willcocks gave the Tenterfield Star a brief tour of the yard we found a dead magpie and two dead galahs on the ground after just a short time.

Mr Willcocks spent much of Friday nailing down sections of the roof ripped up in the storm and, despite all this damage, he said the pair felt lucky because they were not in the house at the time.

The Connolly’s rain gauge recorded about 40mm of rain on Wednesday night.

Mrs Connolly said that about two-thirds of it fell in the evening storm, which lasted half an hour, and the last third in another storm at approximately 1am.

At Kurrajong Downs vineyard, about 10km east of Tenterfield, Sue and Lynton Rhodes thought they were in for a beating when they saw the storm clouds approach from the southeast.

Mrs Rhodes said the couple’s Kurrajong vineyard managed to avoid all the late frosts and hail storms that had plagued other properties in the area, and they are two weeks away from harvesting vines heavily laden with fruit.

“We could hear the noise from it (the hail storm). It came within a few hundred metres,” she said.

A few hailstones fell on Kurrajong, but no damage was sustained.

“We had just put out some of the nets that day, so we would have lost those if it had hit,” she said. “We were very, very lucky. I went for a drive and you could see how the trees were shredded just 300 metres up the road.”