More Photographs on the WWFO website.

 

With the erection of the test anemometer a few weeks ago and with council elections pending, the WWFO have decided to release some photo-collage impressions of what, from various selected viewpoints, a 10 turbine wind-farm situated in the Cranswick Common / Rotsea Carr area of our locality could look like. “Before and After” images are shown.

 

The turbines as depicted are envisaged to be around 125 meters high.

 

The method by which these pictures were generated cannot pretend to be error free and the pictures themselves should be viewed rather, as artist’s impressions than as architect’s drawings.

 

Photo-montage is the usual method for providing accurate visual representation of wind-farm proposals. But photo-montages provided elsewhere with such proposals have relied on computer generated images based on wire-frame views that are themselves generated using Ordnance Survey contours of the area. Such methods of picture generation are beyond us. The images we are showing have been generated by a method more akin to the art of collage and we prefer therefore, to characterise them, or at least sub-classify them, as photo-collages.

 

So far as this wind-farm is concerned the turbine height and number proposed are well known. For the layout of the wind-farm depicted, guidance has been taken from co-ordinates provided by the developers, (in the notification of their proposal to parish councils).

 

By releasing these images we hope to give some idea of the impact that the proposed development could have on our locality. Without something like this, the first opportunity for members of the public to visualise what was being proposed would likely come with the photomontages provided as part of the Environmental Statement which accompanies the developer’s planning application. In other words, such photo-montages as might be produced would only become available to view with receipt of the planning application itself. But usually, once the planning application has been received by the council the clock starts ticking more or less immediately, and with the deadline for receipt of objections usually set at about a month later, the general public could seem to get little enough chance to properly understand what it is that is really going to happen to their locality, let alone to find the time to “have their say”.

 

You might think that the test anemometer itself should be a guide. But although it is visible to many of the settlements around, (including Frodingham, Skerne, Hutton Cranswick et al), it is relatively short, (being “only” 80 meters high), and it is very thin so that its visibility depends heavily on lighting conditions and the time of day etc.

 

Clearly, with elections to Parish and Ward pending, we hope to ensure that, during the pre-election period, the wind farm issue receives the attention which, we believe, is due to it.

 

Please remember that these images are photographic stills. I have attempted to convey movement by varying the position of the blades of adjacent turbines but inevitably you tend to end up with something that looks like a giant sculpture park, (full of surrealist art perhaps?).  In fact, of course, the blades are usually turning continuously.  It is for me, a particular objection to these machines that they can make the landscape behind and around them seem to disappear. The extended spread of the turbines, their size and the rotating blades ensure that even at a distance they preoccupy the mind so that everything near or beside them becomes virtually invisible.

 

It is a belief of mine that the landscape belongs to everyone however the land itself is owned or by whom. I believe that our sense of freedom and our well-being generally, are bound up with our right of access to landscapes and our experience of them.

 

In fact, this particular wind farm will have managed to position itself in our landscape more of less precisely beside the central area of interconnection of the network of footpath rights of way that provide access to it.   Who benefits from this?

 

Will a wind-farm enhance this landscape, our landscape, which is so near to all of us because it lies so centrally to the vicinity of so many settlements, the villages and towns around it?   I think not!   But I hope to concern you, not only with what might be appearing in your own neighbourhood but with what could be appearing elsewhere  in our locality.

 

As to the images themselves I would draw your attention to a couple of points. The picture from the southern end of the River Hull New Cut – (“The Crown of Victory!”) – contains a couple of human figures in it to provide scale. They are just visible a little below the breach in the tree-line on the left of the picture and beside the fence that curves upward from left to right across the image. They are, in fact, in that central area of interconnection of public rights of way that I mentioned above. They are, I admit, difficult to see but that, I suppose, is the point, (and it is another objection to any wind-farm here), that by its sheer size the turbine field would overwhelm and dehumanise our landscape.   

 

The view from Hutton Cranswick has a train in vision to likewise provide a sense of scale.

 

To enable me to convey wind-farm appearances as accurately as I might I have tended to select views which allow a more or less full view of the turbines. Undulations of the ground or belts of trees intervening between the wind-farm site and a view-point do present particular difficulties of depiction which I have sought to avoid. This is an important point to remember. The turbines can have an obvious presence beyond any intervening rise in the ground or brow of a hill or beyond the tops of a line of trees.

 

We have refreshed the photo collection which was already on the website. Some of the first set of photographs remain but better versions have replaced others and some new ones have come in.

 

Remember that the planning application from RES is pending, so try to keep an eye on the website. Further images and info will be forthcoming.

 

We can win this one!

 

 

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“It is a belief of mine that the landscape belongs to everyone however the land itself is owned or by whom. I believe that our sense of freedom and our well-being generally, are bound up with our right of access to landscapes and our experience of them.”

Alan K.