Walshaw Moor: The View That Changed When I Reached the Top

There are some landscapes that photographs struggle to capture.

Walshaw Moor is one of them.

When you first look across the moor, what strikes you is the sheer openness of it. Heather, peat, reservoirs, stone walls and rolling uplands disappear towards an enormous Yorkshire sky.
It feels remote.
It feels peaceful.
And, above all, it still feels like countryside.

Walshaw Moor and the Walshaw Dean reservoirs.

At first glance the landscape dominates the photograph. Look more closely at the distant skyline, however, and another story begins to emerge.
Look at that photograph.
At first glance, you might not even notice the turbines.
That is precisely what happened to me.
The landscape takes over. Your eye is drawn towards the reservoirs, the hills and the sweep of open moorland.
But then I zoomed in.
And things changed.
Look Again at the Horizon

Zooming into the original view reveals the existing turbines standing along the distant horizon.

There they were.

A line of wind turbines sitting on the horizon.

What had appeared almost insignificant in the wide photograph suddenly became unmistakable.

We have subsequently looked more closely at their likely locations. The turbines on these distant ridges appear to include existing developments such as Coal Clough and other wind farms further across the Pennine landscape.

Some of those turbines are approximately 110 to 125 metres high.
And importantly, they are not standing beside us.
They are many miles away.
Yet even at that distance they remain clearly visible against the skyline.
Then I climbed higher.
At the Top of Withins Height, Everything Changed

From higher ground around Withins Height the distant turbines became far more visually prominent.

Once I reached the top of Withins Height, I didn’t need a zoom lens to understand what industrial wind development does to an open skyline.

The turbines stood out like sore thumbs.

That phrase might sound blunt, but it describes exactly what I saw.

Against a landscape dominated by peat, heather and open sky, these large engineered structures immediately attracted the eye.

And that was when the proposed Calderdale Energy Park on Walshaw Moor stopped being an abstract planning proposal for me.

Because now we have to make a comparison.

Those turbines on the distant horizon are considerably smaller than the machines being proposed for Walshaw Moor.
The current proposal envisages turbines reaching up to around 200 metres to blade tip.
Think about that for a moment.
The turbines I could already see standing out on the horizon were perhaps 110–125 metres high and several miles away.
Now imagine structures approaching 200 metres high standing across Walshaw Moor itself.
Not somewhere on the far horizon.
Here.
From Distant Objects to Dominating the Landscape
This is the problem with looking at wind farms purely through planning maps.
On a map, a turbine is a dot.
Thirty-four turbines are thirty-four dots.
Access roads are lines.
Crane pads are shapes.
Cable routes are more lines.
But none of that conveys what happens when you stand in the landscape.
A 200-metre turbine is an enormous structure.

And it doesn’t come alone.

Industrial-scale wind development requires foundations, construction compounds, heavy vehicle access, tracks, crane pads, electrical infrastructure, cabling and associated works.
On Walshaw Moor, those interventions would take place within a landscape containing peat and blanket bog as well as important upland habitats and water catchments.
That matters.
Because Walshaw Moor isn’t vacant land waiting for somebody to find an economic use for it.
The landscape itself has value.
The Main Photograph Tells the Whole Story
Go back to the first photograph.
That is why I wanted to publish these images together.
The wide photograph shows the landscape as most people initially experience it.
Beautiful.
Open.
Unspoilt in character.
The second photograph reveals what is already sitting on the distant skyline.
The third shows how much more noticeable those turbines become when you reach higher ground.
And then comes the unavoidable question:

What happens when the turbines aren’t six, eight or ten miles away?
What happens when turbines substantially taller than those already visible are placed across Walshaw Moor itself?
That is the image people need to hold in their minds when considering Calderdale Energy Park.
Today, when you look across this landscape, the countryside dominates the turbines.
If this development proceeds, there is a real danger that the turbines will dominate the countryside.
That is a fundamental change.
This Is About More Than a View
Some will dismiss landscape concerns as merely aesthetic.
I don’t accept that.
Landscape is part of our inheritance.
Walshaw Moor has been shaped over centuries, while the peat beneath parts of these uplands has developed over thousands of years.
These places provide habitat.
They store water.
Peat stores carbon.
They provide open countryside in an increasingly developed country.
And they provide something that is much harder to put into an environmental spreadsheet:
space.
A place where human infrastructure has not yet overwhelmed everything around it.
Once that quality has gone, it is extraordinarily difficult to recreate.
You cannot industrialise a moor and then pretend that because some vegetation remains between the turbines, nothing important has changed.

For My Lifetime — And Theirs
Standing on Withins Height, looking across Walshaw Moor, I realised something else.
If these turbines are built, the consequences will not simply belong to one planning cycle or one government.

They could remain here for decades.
For much of my remaining lifetime.
For a substantial part of the lives of younger people walking these hills today.

Children who visit Walshaw Moor in future could grow up knowing this landscape not as the place shown in my first photograph, but as an industrial energy landscape dominated by some of the tallest structures ever constructed across these uplands.

That deserves serious consideration.
Because once we make that decision, we cannot simply change our minds the following year and restore the landscape to exactly what it was.

Go and Stand There

That is why I would encourage anybody interested in Calderdale Energy Park to do something very simple.
Go to Walshaw Moor.
Walk it.
Don’t make your judgement entirely from developer brochures, consultation exhibitions or computer-generated images.
Stand beside the reservoirs.
Walk through the heather.
Climb towards Withins Height.
Then look at the existing turbines on the distant horizon.
Remember that some of those are approximately 110–125 metres high.
Remember how far away they are.
And then imagine turbines approaching 200 metres high standing across the landscape much closer to you.
Only then do the dimensions written on a planning document begin to mean something.
Some Places Should Remain Places
We constantly hear that major changes to our countryside are necessary in the name of tackling climate change.
But environmental policy cannot mean protecting one environmental metric while sacrificing everything else.
Peat matters.
Wildlife matters.
Water matters.
Landscape matters.
And people’s connection with the countryside matters.
Walshaw Moor is not simply an available surface upon which energy infrastructure can be placed.
It is a landscape.
And standing there, looking across those reservoirs and seeing the distant turbines breaking the skyline, my conclusion became very simple.
If structures much smaller than those proposed can stand out like sore thumbs from miles away, what will thirty-four turbines approaching 200 metres high do to Walshaw Moor itself?
The first photograph shows what we have today.
We should think very carefully before allowing it to become a photograph of what we once had.
Some landscapes deserve to remain landscapes.
Shane Oxer.   Campaigner for fairer and affordable energy