Will no one ever take on the Green Blob?

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.