Gosh it hurts when your little corner of paradise is destroyed by a few idiots’ ignorance and greed. This is what has just happened to one of Britain’s best-kept secrets, the magically beautiful and remarkably untouristed stretch of the Wye Valley round and about Builth Wells.
Every summer we used to take a holiday let there, jumping into our favourite swim-hole in the Wye, playing Cocky-Olly in the bracken, exploring Llewellyn’s Cave, watching the last of the sun bathe the uplands from the shade of the boules terrain outside the house where we’d enjoy our well-earned fags and evening gin and tonic. But I don’t think I could bear go back there. The sight of what they’re doing to it is just too painful.
By ‘they’ I don’t mean the locals, most of whom have fought long and expensively to stop the nightmare happening. I mean the handful of vulture capitalists and dodgy politicians — mostly outsiders with no understanding of what makes the area special — who’ve forced through an application for an industrial development of seven 110 metre-high wind turbines at Hendy near Hundred House. It will blight the unspoilt landscape for miles around, to the benefit of absolutely no one save the usual kind of rent-seeking spivs who grow rich and fat on this disgusting, taxpayer-subsidised Potemkin industry.
Ultimately, though, it’s not the wind parasites I blame for this, any more than I’d blame cockroaches attracted to a lump of carelessly discarded rotten meat. No: the people above all responsible for the slow ruination of our countryside are the MPs who ten years ago voted through the most Expensive Virtue Signal in history — the 2008 Climate Change Act.
Only five MPs voted against the CCA — among them, Ann Widdecombe and the sainted Peter (now Lord) Lilley — and they have since been more than vindicated.
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