Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won the 2013 Forward Prize. His topical verse and satire appears in the Spectator, and his puzzles and problems in the Sunday Times and American Mathematical Monthly. Email: nipmackinnon@gmail.com
Turbine 14 Foul Sike SD 94346 34584 ///diggers.oils.activates
17 January 2025 Today the dog and I are bound for Foul Sike, where the developers’ peat survey has failed so completely that even the fabulous Kriging algorithm, developed to find gold on the Witwatersrand, had to give up, and no colour is printed. The crosses in the survey are 100m apart, so no point should be further than 35m from a probe. The Kriging then interpolates to give the most likely depths. West of Greave Clough there are large areas with no probing crosses, and the android is dreaming of electric sheep.
We park at Clough Foot, puff up the tarmac past the plantation, drop into Greave Clough and follow the good tracks, surfaced with compact blue shale from far away, to the fords. The beck is running quite strongly, and I am sorry not to have seen the thaw spate which caused such a roaring in Ponden Clough.
The first ford is slippery and the Airedale, who has started muttering “Four legs good: two legs bad” after listening to the audiobook of Animal Farm, is delighted when I fall over on my back in the meltwater. “You’re not from round here, are you?” he says. I remind him he was bred in Cumbria and rehomed from Ramsbottom, so is no more eligible to open the bowling for Yorkshire than I am. Now dangerously cold, I would give up, but the dog says, “We must work harder, Comrade.”
We ford the full stream where the Bannister Land Rovers cross and head up the ecological disaster that accesses some grouse butts. This terrible track was not on Google Maps prior to 2002, as Mark Avery showed. It is not on the 1:35000 used as a base map for the scoping report either. Walshaw Moor is “Here be dragons” as far as that OS product ©2023 is concerned. Do they supply embarrassment-free maps for planning proposals?
This track line is initially too steep for blade delivery, and of course it is much too narrow. If you are thinking about your breathing, then it is too steep for a turbine blade delivery. This track is for the convenience of the guns, and stairs with an eponymous banister are provided at the top to reach the peat surface from the bus stop.
There are a lot more grouse about in 2025 than there have been since 2020, when our house was mobbed every morning by at least twenty, led by a male known locally as Psycho, who said “Hello!” instead of “Go back!”. Grouse populations are cyclic, and in Yorkshire the period is five years, so a peak is due. Bear in mind that left to themselves red grouse only live for two or three years, with two-thirds dying in the first winter. Curlews often live to thirty.
The cause of the cyclicity has been studied for over 70 years and the economic value of grouse means that the experiments have been well funded. Some theories for cyclicity (heather shortage, predator boom) have been disproved, and two cycle drivers have competed in the journals for decades: parasites (an extrinsic cause) and male aggression (intrinsic), both increasing as density increases until the crash. An interesting 2013 paper describes the two theories and proposes a compromise. The ingenuity of the experiments is breath-taking: males are given testosterone implants; grouse are dewormed and reinfected with a measured dose of nematodes. Just as striking is the vociferousness of the two camps, like an Old Firm derby. At the heart is the titanic figure of Adam Watson (1930-2019) whose constituency extended beyond ecology. In April 1962 he’d spent a Saturday burning heather on Deeside. Just before his local shop shut at 11 p.m. he bought six tins of peaches, and at 5 a.m. the following morning set out with birchwood skis and a can opener, and almost by accident made the first traverse on skis of the Cairngorm 4000s.
There is a grand story in the competitive science of grouse cyclicity, with Watson & Moss finding original sin on Deeside while Dobson & Newborn blame the Swaledale worm. Intrinsic or Extrinsic? Is the fault in ourselves or in our stars? Lord of the Flies or Brave New World?
It is one of the socio-economic puzzles of Walshaw Moor that the environment has been so degraded for the convenience of the guns, when hardihood under the elements is what hunters and mountaineers prize most, or we would settle for golf. Why don’t the Walshaw guns enjoy “the long walk in” which is the hallmark of the great day, or week, in nature. Richard Bannister called Walshaw Moor a “trophy asset”. Is his effete clientele a bit of a disappointment to him?
Realisation that it is all a bit naff may finish driven grouse shooting sooner than we think, even at Balmoral, that mothership of contemporary good taste. Fashion is eternal because display is wired into Darwinian sexual selection. Fashions are ephemeral: dancing the Charleston was once a sure-fire way to get laid, but it’s never worked for me.
Last year on the Twelfth the Telegraph had a photo of models in kilts and tweed crop tops, with lovingly chased Purdeys broken over spaghetti-strap shoulders, enjoying a flirty time on the heather and trying to look like Normal People. I thought, “The industry must be in real trouble.” There are extrinsic pressures, applied by Mark Avery, among others, and an intrinsic loss of confidence. The latter may prove faster, though both drivers are potent and interact, like parasites and male aggression in grouse cyclicity, or lead poisoning and elite decadence in the fall of the Roman Empire. It will happen slowly and then all at once.
And so Richard Bannister wonders, “What shall I do with my not very cool grouse moor?” Loads of things, Richard! You own one of the most atmospheric places in Yorkshire. I have rarely spent a day alone on Scotland’s mountains alone, but I often have Walshaw Moor to myself, which is a £2 bus trip from Keighley or Burnley. Adam Watson saw twenty times more people on his 1962 langlauf across the Cairngorm plateau than I see today, which is why I talk to the dog, who says, “Let’s get out of this peat trench, Comrade.”
We take a bearing on a tree on the far side of the clough and pace out a transect south of the track. The peat is about two metres deep here and pulling out the probe is arduous, and the aluminium comes up coated in carbon. The Kriging algorithm has got this transect right: full yellow all the way, though we find one orange depth of 205cm.
We jog back up the track and repeat the process on the north side, starting at the anonymous site of T14 which the algorithm has reckoned is light green, which it is. Now we enter the white area where no dreams disturbed the android’s sleep. As you can see from the map below, the gouge must have started along a discontinuity in the bog, for the peat here is light green almost all the way. You know nothing about the peat until you push in the probe.
I don’t believe there will be turbines west of Greave Clough, but if 302 MW is passed by Ed Miliband, following the strongest rejection by the Planning Inspectorate, the access to the western third will be along the quadbike curve shown in the photo below. Here the slope lies back a bit after the impassable gorge downstream. Further upstream the valley sides steepen again.
The peat is 150-200cm deep here and the track would normally have to float, but it cannot float on the curved scar in the photograph because the lorries need full traction to get going up the slope, and Newton’s third law will destroy a floating track under those transverse and radial forces. A vast tonnage of imported limestone will have to fill a six-metre-wide trench down to bed rock so the lorries can get started. When “up”, the contours are all in the wrong direction and the peat is even deeper. West of Greave Clough you are never really “up.” Everything tilts. It is quite different to the east where there are flat ridge lines, often with light green peat depth. Using the gradients exemplified on Scout Moor wind farm and the guidance of Constructed Tracks in the Scottish Uplands, I cannot draw a feasible track network west of Greave Clough, but I have done so on the rest of CWF.
I’d like to say that ‘unfeasible’ holds for the whole site, but it doesn’t. ‘Unfeasible’ is too strong a word to describe the engineering and financial difficulties of a (say) 150 MW CWF, mostly on the central Heather Hill massif. There are, however, many strong reasons not to put a wind farm west of Greave Clough. The main ones are that it’s currently illegal, like the rest of CWF; and will flood Hebden Bridge with the same inevitability as the LA fires; but it is also unfeasible: the peat is too deep, and floating roads won’t work on the slope or traversing the tilt. Dr Osman is already paying Richard Bannister for eight hundred hectares, 30% of CWF, that he simply cannot use; Christopher Wilson said, correctly, in December 2023 that CWF is not economic below 200 MW but the feasible wind farm (granted a bigger change in the law than is being trailed ahead of the Planning and Infrastructure Bill) is about 150 MW.
The reality is that a buried Rochdale connection is far too expensive relative to the build cost of a 150 MW wind farm. The budget for the whole build should be £1.2 million per MW, so a 150 MW wind farm should cost £180 million. Immediately, the £34 million cost of the 132 kV cable dig to Rochdale is far too high a percentage at 18%. A typical figure for all the electrics is 9% of the build cost. Note that a buried cable is specified in the scoping report, submitted by the developer. If the cable was strung on sycamore H-poles, the lifetime cost of this connection would be quartered and would no longer be fatal to a 150 MW CWF.
CWF at any megawattage is beginning to look like one of the zombie projects clogging up the embedded capacity registers. If we built all the zombies that are on the registers we would already have twelve times too much wind generation. The plan is for 15 GW more onshore and 45 GW more offshore by 2030. There are 722 GW of unbuilt wind already queued up in the capacity registers, of which CWF’s registered 240 MW represents 0.033%. We really don’t have to destroy the SAC/SPA system for 0.033%, and the wind gold rush has only just started. Give it another year and CWF may be at 0.011%. As the Friends of the Earth map shows, there is a super-abundance of sites for on-shore wind in England without going within 2km of an SAC/SPA or further than 5km from a substation.
The only reason to think CWF might happen is that Christopher ‘440 Kelvin-Volts’ Wilson is siphoning millions from Dr Osman’s account in Blyth (where there’s a Santander staffed by lovable Geordies Ant and Dec) into Richard Bannister’s account in Colne (where the Santander is staffed by lovable Geordies Dec and Ant). For those who can’t tell them apart, Dec is the one standing next to Ant.
A gamekeeper zips past on a quadbike and a minute later a single shotgun blast rips past me, followed by a ripple off the packed diffraction grating of Sutcliffe Plantation. A trapped stoat from the citadel has been given its quietus. I feel the death acutely. I’ve been reading George Orwell’s “A Hanging” with a pupil. While an Airedale terrier puts on a typical performance, Orwell notes the condemned man “stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.” Like the dead man walking, the stoat will still have been reasoning about escape until the first pellets mashed its brain. Yet if I were in one of the ghastly traps that age and medicine have set for some of us, I would welcome the mercy of a sudden end. Digging the car out on day eleven of the snow, a friend remarked that he had just done his, and that hard work in the cold can give you a heart attack. “But we die in action!” he said, shaking his imaginary shovel like a freedom fighter’s rifle.
Ahead are agents of Christopher Wilson with surveying equipment. As I get closer, they resolve into birdwatchers with cameras on tripods, and they shift my mood. “What have you got?” “Crossbills. Five and some redpolls. No siskins.” In white, looking like a Finn in the Winter War against Stalin, is Andrew Cockroft, who introduces himself as a moth expert belonging to the Halifax Scientific Society. “I’m a wind farm campaigner” I hazard. “For or against?” “Against. I write a fortnightly blog for Mark Avery” There is immediate relaxation. “Mark Avery’s a good guy. It’s great for moths up there. Vapourers especially, with an amazing caterpillar, but also Oak Eggars and Emperors. What have you been doing?” I show him the filthy bit of paper with the blank in the peat survey and my soundings. “I saw them doing that survey not long after Covid. Just a lad and lass sliding around north of Gablestone with a probe. Its difficult up there. Peat must be very deep.” “It’s easy probing the peat down here,” I say, showing my oily hands. “Once it’s more than a metre it’s a real effort pulling out the probe, especially in the cold. They’ll have done fifty a day for months.” “The heather and bilberry either side of that Bannister gouge is great for Green Hairstreaks.” I look these up when I get back. Wow!.
I was delighted to get Andrew’s account of the surveyors, two youngsters doing hard outdoor work on the lowest rungs of longed-for jobs in ecology. Their data has given us a unique picture of the moor’s hidden secrets. It isn’t their fault that their bosses skimped the job when two more days would have seen it properly finished. “Don’t bother. We’re not going there anyway.”
More members of the HSS come up the tarmac. Andrew has the faraway look. I’ve seen it in Johnny Turner, bent double like a giraffe at the waterhole to identify moss, and today I may have it myself. “It must have been amazing up there. You don’t see anyone all day. Just nature.”
(Andrew Cockcroft will now be doing T49 Sutcliffe Plantation in late Spring, and the Halifax Scientific Society are going to T39 Hole Head in June in search of West Yorkshire’s only colony of northern marble moths. These serendipitous meetings are part of the charisma of Walshaw Moor.)
This is the 28th in a series of 65 guest blogs on each of the wind turbines which Richard Bannister plans to have erected on Walshaw Moor. Turbines 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 16, 17, 21, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56, 58, 62, 64 and 65 have already been described. To see all the blogs – click here.
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