Country diary: Powys
Like some wriggling, live thing, the Welsh border east of Montgomery loops and writhes, sends out a salient to claim for Wales the lion couchant form of Corndon Hill – a noble height that belongs geologically with neighbouring Shropshire. I climb up from Priestweston, intending to take the steep path alongside the block of forestry on its west flank, and find the trees have been clear-felled. A wasteland of blanched stumps remains, the great bronze age summit cairn now unoppressed by adjacent dark conifers. Sixty years ago, as the mass afforestation project began which was to destroy Welsh rural communities, a government spokesman asserted that “we intend to change the face of Wales. We know there will be opposition but we intend to force this thing through.”
It was done. The people went. Land was blighted. This ground in front of me is like a battlefield from which the conflict has passed on. I think of first world war poet David Jones in Mametz Wood from the last section of In Parenthesis. The sun is descending behind far Welsh hills, their crests fretted with phalanxes of lofty wind-turbines. Again, the Welsh landscape is to be changed, the government “determined to force this thing through”.
There is no gainsaying the necessity for responsible energy production and usage, but debate about sensitivity and appropriateness of siting is consistently stifled. Effective destruction of a landscape of immense spiritual significance to the whole community of Britain is again taking place. Sane promotion of renewable energy sources is submerged by a welter of “green” zealotry, which has all the characteristics of a millenarianist religious sect, in which “you are either for us or against us”. Here at twilight on top of Corndon Hill, I am for the land’s long survival, lament the limitations in our sense of this.
Jim Perrin
The Guardian
14 November 2009
Tags: Wind power, Wind energy
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