We are grateful to Jim Perrin for bringing our plight to much wider attention regarding novice “wind developer” Bute Energy, which has never before constructed a single wind turbine yet has designs to desecrate and destroying the rural landscapes of Wales with some 22 “energy parks” including atop the ancient domed Silurian hills of the Radnor Forest.
New Radnor, Powys: I reject in the strongest terms the idea that we must choose between building renewables and keeping our most precious land
By Jim Perrin for The Guardian • 9 February 2023
‘Affective value of this magnificent hill dome will be lost for ever.’
Photograph: Simon Whaley Landscapes/Alamy
To gain the high points of Fforest Clud (Radnor Forest), you start from New Radnor and head through the afforested Mutton Dingle, an appropriate name for a landscape feature in a region where sheep far outnumber people.
The track leads into and eventually out of extensive spruce plantation. Conifers thin as you climb, giving way to native oak, birch, alder, hawthorn and ash. New growth on the dancing larches is brilliantly green. Long-tailed tits dart continually among the trees, still seeking moss with which to line their marvellously woven nests for rearing late broods. Verges are starred and spangled with tormentil and hawkweed. Green flowers of wood spurge glow against their older foliage; gorse blooms among tree-shadow. It’s that final phase of yellow flowering season.
Soon you debouch on to grassland below the fine conical hill of Whimble. Stow your rucksack here and plod unencumbered to the fine bronze age tumulus atop its summit – a magnificent viewpoint. Across the glacial overflow channel of Whinyard Gap, which once carved off Whimble from its parent massif, you can pick out all the features of one of the finest hill groups in the Marches.
But it’s to be marred. Bute Energy is planning an enormous wind factory here. Access roads will be scoured across Fforest Clud’s smooth flanks. Thirty-six 220-metre wind turbines are planned across the summit ridges. Each demands more than 2,000 tonnes of concrete, pylons and power lines. Hundreds of acres of solar panels could also adorn the hillsides. Extensive peat deposits – environmentally crucial, and unlike anything I’ve come across outside Black Hill, Kinder and Bleaklow – will be disturbed. Affective value of this magnificent hill dome will be lost for ever.
In principle, I ardently support renewable energy. But the UK has a dwindling stock of prime wild country, and this kind of industrial-scale onshore project will mean yet more of it is lost, for ever. Please think again, Bute. The push for net zero does not have to mean losing that which is infinitely precious, wild and fine. This is not nimbyism. It is heartfelt concern for what, once gone, cannot be replaced. We’ve made that mistake too many times, and the whole nation suffered.
I have to say I have little use for renewables - first for their uselessness, second for their land grabs and scaring of our most precious land, third the tax grabbing, greenwashing corporations and individuals who are only thinking of the money - our tax money that they can sweep up and is being handed out liberally!
Ineffective and useless should have no place in a "green" society in this century - how far have we fallen! Then the worse nightmare is a few years down the road, when these corporations have made (taken) all they can and move on to their next conquest. The landscapes will be scared forever, never to return to their former glory, the worthless equipment will be left atop that hill, waiting to crumble and spread it's toxic ingredients far and wide.
Now is the time for the dragon to return (or a knight is shining armor) to fight for this hilltop, but I'm afraid the only fire breathing going on will be the wind turbines as they falter and self-destruct atop the hill.
in The Guardian no less ;-))
depending on the view (and a bit of imagination) one can recognise a giant lying dragon in the outline of the hills.
I have to say I have little use for renewables - first for their uselessness, second for their land grabs and scaring of our most precious land, third the tax grabbing, greenwashing corporations and individuals who are only thinking of the money - our tax money that they can sweep up and is being handed out liberally!
Ineffective and useless should have no place in a "green" society in this century - how far have we fallen! Then the worse nightmare is a few years down the road, when these corporations have made (taken) all they can and move on to their next conquest. The landscapes will be scared forever, never to return to their former glory, the worthless equipment will be left atop that hill, waiting to crumble and spread it's toxic ingredients far and wide.
Now is the time for the dragon to return (or a knight is shining armor) to fight for this hilltop, but I'm afraid the only fire breathing going on will be the wind turbines as they falter and self-destruct atop the hill.