  We study Vietoris hyperspaces of closed and closed final sets of Priestley
spaces. We are particularly interested in Skula topologies. A topological space
is \emph{Skula} if its topology is generated by differences of open sets of
another topology. A compact Skula space is scattered and moreover has a natural
well-founded ordering compatible with the topology, namely, it is a Priestley
space. One of our main objectives is investigating Vietoris hyperspaces of
general Priestley spaces, addressing the question when their topologies are
Skula and computing the associated ordinal ranks. We apply our results to
scattered compact spaces based on certain almost disjoint families, in
particular, Lusin families and ladder systems.
