It’s difficult to know where to start when attempting to comment on the campaign by Joanna Lambert against a new windfarm… especially when plenty of others have already subjected her to plentiful dose of ridicule. Never mind, I’ll try.
When Watchfield air base was started it was a heavy drop air base, and the reason for this was that they found there were exceptionally low wind levels around Watchfield.
Remind me of that later please….
My reaction when I came over the hill on Friday to see they had gone up was that they are so much bigger and more dominating than I imagined.
So dominating that you didn’t see them until you went over the hill. Massive, then.
I was someone who thought they wouldn’t be awful, but they are and have completely devasated the landscape.
Err… to the west, Swindon; to the east, Didcot power stations. Blinkered vision is a dreadful impediment.
They are so enormously tall and move all the time so the eye is drawn to them, not like a building which is static and you learn to look beyond it.
So you’d prefer five 50 metre high blocks of flats to be built there would you? No? Thought not.
Millions of people over the last 4,000 years must have walked along the Ridgeway marvelling at the intimate beauty of the Vale.
For most of the last 4000 years, walking was more a necessity than a leisure activity. I suspect they had more pressing thoughts on their mind than “Isn’t it pretty here.”
Until that awful day ten days ago the walker’s eye drifted to the church towers, to the tall poplars and oaks.
And to the six cooling towers of Didcot A power station in the background.
Yet now five massive industrial turbines with angry noisy blades cutting the air will dominate the landscape for decades to come, and shatter the peace and serenity for those around.
I’d never realised the traffic on the A420 and the trains on the Great Western mainline were so quiet until you mentioned it. And what was it you said about it being an air base? Guess those aircraft were silent too. Oh yes, and did you say something about there not being much wind? That’ll be the meek and quiet variety of ‘angry noisy blades’ then.
Even when the blades are turning, electricity is not necessarily being generated unless the wind blows at the right speed. Because of this irregularity this plant will have to be inefficiently backed up by fossil fuel power.
It’s fortunate that we’ve got Didcot power stations sitting so prettily in the background then, isn’t it?
It seems a cruel trick that 10 to 20 per cent of all our energy bills in future will be a hidden levy to fund this ongoing rural destruction without any serious clean electricity produced
I trust you’ll be submitting a letter in support of a Watchfield nuclear power station then? No?
All campaigns need publicity. I suspect this sort of attention wasn’t quite what Ms Lambert had in mind.