Windfarms

'Dong' is set to build super wind turbines off the coast between Heysham and Barrow and what an interesting and informative leaflet they produced, providing technical information. I got a leaflet in Heysham, but lent it to someone and now it's lost. What a pity as I might have regaled you with facts.

I often come across windfarms on my travels.  Now as one crosses the border to Scotland the once vast forests are being felled for timber and the land being utilised for windfarms.  Once when holidaying near Stranraer I drove onto desolate moorland with a single track road and after crossing hill and dale came across the beginnings of a windfarm development. So the road ahead had been widened for cable laying and access. The once open tract of land was fenced with substantial tracks going into the distance. Initially it took some time to figure out what was happening as no turbines had been delivered nor erected yet. I wondered what impact this construction work and consequent wind production might have on wildlife.

Out in Morecambe Bay the turbines span the horizon, row upon row...very often unmoving, according to weather conditions. Some say that the cost of erecting and maintaining these outweighs their electrical output, and that they are in fact inefficient.

Mankind though needs all the power it can get, as demand may outstrip production. We are in a no- win  situation it seems. Love them or loathe them it seems we need them.

It does not necessarily anger me that I see them in the landscape...after all they can make use of relatively unproductive moorland, heath and estuary. They provide me with a landmark when I am out walking. The best ones locally for this lie in Littledale, where the narrow road ends in the Lancashire Fells. Actually I can spot them from the prom in Fleetwood and they provide a pointer to the Fells either side and beyond into Yorkshire.

Travelling east from Blackpool there is one by the cheese factory. This amuses me as I don't visualize electricity production, but instead in my imagination I see the paddles turning to make the cheese...if the turbine turns slowly I think that the curds and whey must be taking a long time to separate!

Unfortunately if you absolutely abhor the sight of wind turbines then it must be pretty annoying to see so many being erected. Needs must though and until mankind finds some other efficient source of energy or realises that windfarms are just not economically viable, it seems we have to put up with them.

My poem this week does not mention wind turbines until the last few lines. I wrote this piece after ascending Clougha Pike specifically to find some constructions built by Andy Goldsworthy on the north slope of the fell. This small windfarm is in Littledale.

      Andy Goldsworthy's Sculptures

      Three silent sentinels amid the moorland heather
      Facing sunwards, all three, facing wind and weather.
      In line- not touching- brothers in stone together.

      Openings gazing out towards the sunrise,
      As if in a silent scream of sudden surprise
      At the view to Yorkshire and the Ingleborough rise.

      Three alone in a disused quarry of lime,
      A boulder strewn landscape forgotten in time.
      Where men once grafted, faces drawn in grime.

      Three silent sentinels that tell of the past,
      Of a labour in quarrying- not to last-
      Shortlived, essential once but gone too fast.

      Three brothers side by side never linking.
      One eye each looking out - unblinking,
      Where across the valley turbines turn unthinking.

      Linked together across the ages forever
      Technology old and new bound together.
      Many silent sentinels standing in the heather.....


 Thanks for reading and Happy New Year! Kath

Read More

Blue

Last year at the launch of the Walking On Wyre map in Garstang Norman Hadley read a wonderful poem, ‘Learning The Truth About Kingfishers’ that explained how the blue flash we associate with kingfishers is a conjuring between light and feather.

We call the sky blue, when more often than not it appears white or grey. Same with the sea – although Homer saw it as ‘wine-dark’. Today the colour of Morecambe Bay is that spectacular silvery grey that cannot be replicated. There could be no Twitter storm about that (or possibly not…).

 

So is blue a trick of the light, a colour of interpretation, of cultural context? Perhaps that’s why it is the colour most readily associated with mood and music… Perhaps that’s why it has become the default colour of those two great elements in nature: sky and sea. They are not fixed in the way trees and grass are fixed. They are temperamental – in the sense they are so much the natural environment they both change it and change with it.

 

I think this is why I love the sea so much. It is the nearest thing I know that allows me to become absorbed by the natural world. It is not the same from one moment to the next. Now I look at the bay and think I can see dimples of blue as the wind picks up and grazes the shallower water.

 

I can get closer to the sea than I can sky. I can sail or swim. In doing so, I lose myself. Or rather I lose a part of myself in the course of trying to survive it. Which part? Probably the part that is impervious to interpretation or tricks of the light, the part that just responds, the instinctual understanding of body in body. I wonder if this is the part that has grown over my creatureliness as the skin I require to have to be human and live amongst humans. This all sounds very romantic until you remember we came from this great body of water, before we became who we are now.

 

Now I look at Morecambe Bay and see the colour of wet skin. 

 

I thought I’d leave you with two poems. Norman’s in case you missed it before, and one I wrote on finding myself 70 miles from the sea after six weeks sailing around Scotland.

Learning The Truth About Kingfishers
The planet lost a little of its patina
the day he told me that a kingfisher’s
not really blue. “Oh no,” he intoned,
“there’s not a hint of pigment
in their plumage. Deep in shade,
they fade to just another LBJ.”
It seems that something in their feather-hairs
can scatter sun to conjure colour from a blur of air,
as if there is a world of brilliance somewhere
the bird reveals as it unzips the river.

Norman Hadley

 

Sealegs

After

she cannot venture inland

without feeling

even on the stillest day of the year

reduced by the moor

like a Rothko on its postcard ―

heather mopping the light,

despite her staring

at the sky’s unblinking blue. 

Sarah Hymas

Read More