Around 3,000 homes across Scotland were still without power on Friday afternoon, after heavy snow downed power lines and cut supply to around 45,000 homes

Scottish and Southern Electricity said that as of Friday morning engineers had restored supply to 42,000 of the affected homes. The outages are centred in an area south-west of Perth, including Gleneagles and Blackford - but thousands of houses in the north-east are also without power.

The main problems were caused by a downed line over the busy A9 dual carriageway between Perth and Stirling, near Braco. Some homes are experiencing constant loss of power, while intermittent blackouts have been rolling across the region.

Another cable fell on the B974 Banchory to Fettercairn road, again causing outages.

A spokesman for Scottish and Southern Energy said that its engineering teams were doing everything possible to restore power as soon as possible this morning.

But engineers were facing difficulties getting to downed lines with many roads closed due to snow.

Additional staff have been drafted in from England to help deal with the outages. Teams initially managed to restore supply to 1000 homes after re-routing power around the network.

Ross Easton from Scottish and Southern Energy said: "We have customers affected by lines weighted down after heavy snowfall icing over. We had 45,000 customers affected from yesterday to today.

"Because of the weather other faults have been coming in but we've been battling against the weather to restore supplies."

He added: "We were working as late as we could last night. The council has helped us get into the more remote sections of the network by using ploughs. We have also been doing line patrols to assess any potential damage to the network."

"At present we have around about 3,000 customers off supply. Most are in the south-west Perthshire area - Gleneagles and Auchterarder mainly. There are also still some offline in the north east around Huntly and Banchory.

"We have as many engineers as possible out working as hard as they can to get them back online by the end of today."