Thirty years ago Ted Hughes, Jeanette Winterson and sixty-two other signatories stood against an “assault on our literary and artistic heritage”: a proposal to build forty-four wind turbines on the moors above Haworth, the West Yorkshire home of the Brontës (Letters, February 18, 1994).
We, the undersigned, are standing again – this time against an impending planning application for England’s largest onshore wind farm on this area of international literary significance and ecological importance. At 655ft tall the 65 proposed turbines would be two-thirds the height of the Eiffel Tower. They would be visible for twenty-five miles, and would be served by miles of access roads across fragile peat.
These are not just the wuthering heights written into immortality by the Brontës, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, or the wily, windy moors sung about by Kate Bush. They are a unique, highly protected priority habitat. The turbines would occupy eleven Site of Special Scientific Interest land units, which also have European Natura 2000 status (now transferred into UK law). The area is home to protected, endangered birds such as breeding merlin and golden plover, as well as other breeding bird assemblages, including curlews.
The peat moors include significant areas of blanket bog – as the biggest natural storers of carbon in the UK, blanket bogs are known as the UK’s Amazon rainforest. Their unique hydrology offers a protective barrier during extreme rainfall, which reduces peak flow during repeated floods in the Calder Valley and other areas. And they are loved, as a vital green resource for mental and physical health by inhabitants and visitors from Burnley, Bradford, Leeds and the industrial North, and by literary pilgrims from across the world.
Along with the RSPB, the Brontë Society, Lancashire and Yorkshire Wildlife Trusts, the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England and multiple other organizations, we oppose this proposal on the grounds of the profound ecological and cultural harm it would cause. In the movement towards net zero carbon we need long-term solutions which restore habitat and biodiversity; which are alert to the value of culture and community; and which enhance natural carbon storage in oceans, forests, peat and other soils.
Alan Ayckbourn, Frieda Hughes, Robert Macfarlane, Sally Wainwright, Jeanette Winterson and 351 others (see the-tls.co.uk for the full list)
The Royal Society of Literature
We are a heterogeneous group of writers, loosely linked by professional acquaintance and in some cases friendship, but recently brought together by concern about reports that the Royal Society of Literature attempted to censor an article in its own RSL Review (see NB, February 2 and 9). All of us are Fellows of the Society, some elected in the past few years, others as long ago as the 1980s. Five have been members of its Council, some mor
