On a walking holiday in France a couple of weeks ago, I was making my way along the ridge that forms the very edge of the plateau of the Vercors when I heard a whooshing, rushing sound behind me that made me jump. When I turned, I jumped again, for there, less than 100 yards away and level with me, was a glider sailing through the sky, so close that I could see the pilot’s face as he gracefully rode the thermals that rose from the valley bottom, a thousand feet below.
As the plane flew away, some words flew into my head: ‘Then off, off forth on swing,/ As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding/ Rebuffed the big wind.’
I had had a ‘Windhover’ moment; I had ‘caught’ that morning, something remarkable, even if it wasn’t quite the epiphany experienced by Gerard Manley Hopkins, when he had been transfixed by the way a falcon’s flight fused with the air to express the glory of God’s creation. I had been transfixed by the beauty of nature reflected by a machine.
If only all man-air-machine encounters were so harmonious! When I got home a few days later, I was in for a shock. Home is north Norfolk, one of few places where the England of the imagination still exists. North Norfolk is beautiful. People come here to paint it. The landscape is gentle and the vistas are long, and both are held as one under a wide sky. Here, what is man-made is in steady harmony with nature: our buildings are made of grey stones and red clay dug from Norfolk soil.
On top of the pile of post on the doormat was the village newsletter. Inside, among the usual advertisements for septic tank emptying and Aga servicing, announcements about kneeler-embroidering and line-dancing groups, the dates of village fetes, and photographs of local landmarks, was news of a planning application to erect a 270-foot wind turbine that would cast a sickening, flickering shadow over the lot.
The wind turbine at Bodham would be five times the height of our village church tower, but it is not proposed to build it in dressed stone and knapped flint. Its scale, medium and outline would violate land and sky, and — even though it would be erected five miles from it — it would also be visible from the sea. This is not the sort of ugliness that could be encountered and turned away from; it would be an inescapable, disproportionate presence that would degrade one of the prettiest parts of the county.
They’ve got to be kidding, I thought. No chance. The planners wouldn’t wear it. To build anything like that at Bodham would be as contemptible an assault on our national heritage as taking a Stanley knife to a publicly owned painting by John Constable. Only a madman would do that, I thought, and anyone with a soul seeing him raise his arm would surely grab his wrist to stop him.
So I put aside the newsletter, confident that our corner of England would be protected by an assertion of the obvious: that Bodham does not need a wind farm, that north Norfolk does not need a wind farm, and if the nation needs wind farms — and that’s a big ‘if’ — then they can be built off-shore, like the 78 turbines that have already been erected off the east of England coast.
But then I opened one of the magazines that had been delivered when we had been on holiday, and I saw that my confidence was utterly misplaced. As I read James Delingpole’s column on windfarms in the 6 August Spectator, I realised that there is a madman standing in every landscape gallery in the country, and the slashing and defacement have begun.
We should be pinning these antisocial sickos to the ground and calling for help, but that’s not what’s been happening. Our collective response has been so soulless because so many of us no longer have a sense of having a soul. The new orthodoxy is that salvation is not a matter for individuals and for eternity: it’s about saving the world collectively, and saving it now — by covering it with windfarms. To doubt this dogma is to damn yourself as much an enemy of humanity as if you had been caught drilling a hole below the waterline in Noah’s ark.
That is why vast turbines now bestride some of the most beautiful of our nation’s landscapes like colossal statues of Saddam Hussein or Joseph Stalin, embodying and directing the collective will. The bigger, the better: their size and prominence is precisely the point. The more beautiful the landscape those turbines desecrate, the more reassuring for the faithful, for it shows that we are determined to save the only, godless world we have at any cost.
All of which might — just might — be intellectually, if not morally defensible, if wind farm technology were capable of saving the world. But it isn’t. Wind farmers justify themselves by quoting the capacity of their output; what they don’t tell you is that the wind, being a natural phenomenon, bloweth when as well as where it listeth, so that capacity is never achieved. The latest figures reveal that for the last two years, the UK’s offshore windfarms operated at only three-tenths capacity, while last year, onshore turbines dribbled out just over a feeble fifth. And this is the technology that the government wants to spend £140 billion of our money on by 2020 — most of it wasted, and all of it ripping our skyscape to shreds.
We shouldn’t let it happen. Much has been lost, but there’s much that can still be saved. In my neck of the woods, what it is at stake is a beauty that has touched the souls of painters, writers and poets for centuries, all of them moved by the wild grandeur of its sky.
‘I am still reeling with delight at the soaring majesty of Norfolk,’ wrote John Betjeman. It would be a sin to bring that reeling to an end.
Comments