Wind Farms - Tilting at Windmills

A couple of days ago, I casually mentioned to Sir Martin Doughty - the chair of English Nature and undisputed champion of the countryside - that I like the look of wind farms. Would I, he asked (in a way that sounded more like a challenge than a question) be happy to see one built in or about the village that I now call home? Certainly, I replied. But not in my back yard. The view from the kitchen window is too restricted to allow me to enjoy the full beauty. The ideal site would be the edge of the limestone ridge that protects us from the cold north wind.

Sir Martin is too practical a man to be described as "in himself an entire humane society" - James Agate's compliment to John Galsworthy. But one of the many reasons I admire him is my suspicion that he, too, "sides with the fox against the man in pink, the hen coop against the marauding fox, the chickweed against the chicken and whatever the chickweed preys on against that ferocious plant". His next question radiated concern for my personal safety: "Have you said so in public?"

I have now. And I am prepared to defend my position against all-comers - the conservationists who think that every addition to the landscape is desecration, the environmentalists who want what they call an uninterrupted view across the hills and moors, and the lobbyists who earn their living from the other energy sources that wind power threatens. I base my case on one simple contention.

It has nothing to do with economics. It may well be that the cost of land wind farm-produced electricity is 5.4p per kW as compared with 2p to 3p per kW for electricity generated by nuclear power stations. That is not my concern. I am interested only in the aesthetics of wind power - the elegant silver masts against the skyline, the rotating blades reflecting the pale sunlight of an English afternoon and emitting the hum of a thousand bees.

I admit that wind farms came into my life at a moment of extreme emotional susceptibility. I was in the castle at Tintagel, the birthplace of King Arthur. When I looked out across the broken ramparts to the sea I saw what seemed to be a dozen elegant arms waving to me through the mist. I thought of the hand that reached out from the lake to catch Excalibur. I have been a wind farm man ever since.

In slightly more prosaic language, each of the 21st-century windmills is a great deal more visually attractive than any of the sculptures in Charles Saatchi's collection. Because they are so obviously beautiful, I have spent some time speculating about why wind farms arouse such animosity. I have come to the conclusion that they conflict with two of Old England's most ingrained prejudices.

First, they have not been blessed by antiquity. Anything that is old - no matter how ugly - we revere. Watch the heritage programmes that fail to enliven our television viewing and you will hear paeans of praise for the most ghastly buildings whose only merit is their decrepitude. Wind farms commit the unpardonable sin of being built on land that has "remained undisturbed for a thousand years".

The disturbance should be judged on its merits, not its age. Quarries that cut great gashes in the hillside look romantic a hundred years after the workings are abandoned. But, before the wounds heal, they are a visual tragedy. So are the prefabricated hutments that replace stone byres and barns half their size. They would offend the eye wherever they were built. If wind farms appeared in towns, they would be said to enhance the urban skyline. They are offensive because they are built in the country.

The country is where a basically urban people believe they can find nature. And the second misconception that prejudices us against wind farms is the notion that nature is something that is untouched by human hand. Men and women are part of nature, too. Bishop Heber - who told us, "Every prospect pleases and only man is vile" - was a rotten theologian. If God made the hills and rivers, He also made the wind farms. And He made them beautiful.

My neighbours will be reassured by the knowledge that, as far as I am aware, there are no plans to bring wind farms to the Peak District National Park. The lynch mobs can be stood down. But were they to be built across these clouded hills, there is no doubt our history would unfold. There would be long, and perhaps violent, protests that matched those that followed the announcement that Victorian railway companies were going to build a viaduct in these parts. Then, after the passage of a century or so, the pattern would again repeat itself. Tourists would marvel at the elegant ingenuity of a bygone age.