We must act now to save our country from the scourge of wind turbines

The place I love more than anywhere on earth is the Edw Valley in mid-Wales. We’ve been going there every summer for more than a decade now and the kids think of it as their second home. When I die — as I nearly did once, you’ll remember, when I was carried off down the River Edw in full spate only to be rescued by an overhanging branch — you’ll find engraved in my heart the name of the hamlet where we stay. Cregrina. It’s our garden of Eden.

In the evenings, long after the valley has descended into shadow, the moors on the humpbacked hills are still bathed in golden light and every time I look at them I think of the Churchillian sunlit uplands whose prospect gave us hope in our darkest hour. Often as not, I’ll have been up there myself earlier in the day, among the heather and bilberries and occasional grouse, looking across towards the bleakness of Hay Bluff and the Brecon Beacons on one side and on the other down towards the white blob of ‘our’ house amid lush, knobbly, sheep-dotted country redolent of The Shire.

But every time I’ve looked at those views for the last few years, my joy has been tinged with melancholy. ‘How long will it be?’ I’ve wondered to myself. ‘How long?’

And now I have my answer. It has happened.

By ‘it’, of course, I mean the arrival of the first wind turbine. They’ve put it up in Rhulen, whose simple whitewashed 13th-century church is one of the oldest and prettiest in Radnorshire. Not, clearly, that that made any difference to the planners who pushed it through. Any more, apparently, than the special quality of the landscape did.