We must act now to save our country from the scourge of wind turbines

The place I love more than anywhere on earth is the Edw Valley in mid-Wales. We’ve been going there every summer for more than a decade now and the kids think of it as their second home. When I die — as I nearly did once, you’ll remember, when I was carried off down the River Edw in full spate only to be rescued by an overhanging branch — you’ll find engraved in my heart the name of the hamlet where we stay. Cregrina. It’s our garden of Eden.

In the evenings, long after the valley has descended into shadow, the moors on the humpbacked hills are still bathed in golden light and every time I look at them I think of the Churchillian sunlit uplands whose prospect gave us hope in our darkest hour. Often as not, I’ll have been up there myself earlier in the day, among the heather and bilberries and occasional grouse, looking across towards the bleakness of Hay Bluff and the Brecon Beacons on one side and on the other down towards the white blob of ‘our’ house amid lush, knobbly, sheep-dotted country redolent of The Shire.