April 16, 2008
Letters, Scotland

Dismayed by new design

I have downloaded the new Windylights brochure and am dismayed at the minimal alterations to this giant proposal.

My concerns over the proposed wind farm are many, the environmental impact on land and wildlife being just one.

However I would like to tell a little story that could become our truth should the proposals go ahead….

Travelling along the road on one of those beautiful, sunny, though cold Shetland days I watched the colours of the landscape unfold in the sunlight. It was late afternoon and the light was coming from the west. As I reached the crest of a hill where I used to see Arctic hares playing, the first line of shadow came into view. I remembered how it used to be along the road, the heather and the peat, the blues and the greens, the hares white grey. Now bars of shadow stretched across the land this Shetland afternoon. The low lay of the sun as the year began to winter made shadows far longer than the height of the huge pillars that now marched across Da Auld Rock. Not natural shadows with curves and shape – shadow pillars that lay across the land, long and dark. Even at Simmer Dim I thought, they will be there, dark and stiff across the land.

It is not just our horizons that will change. The visual impact of the turbines will be on the land as well as against the sky.

Bunchy Casey,
Brae