Rosemary Goring
Literary editor/columnist
In a speech last week at the National Library of Scotland, Alexander McCall
Smith spoke of his fear of countries and places losing their identities
under the onward creep of globalisation.
Part of his gloomy prediction for Scotland was that it would one day be
covered in wind turbines, what he described as “forests of white metal”. It
was an unusually sombre note for a writer whose raison d’etre is to raise a
smile and lift the spirits, and there was a cheer of agreement from the
members of the Muriel Spark Society, to whom he was speaking.
His concern about the marching army of windmills across Scotland’s hills
came on the heels of the Thomas Hardy Society’s protest against two wind
farm proposals which are to be built near Tolpuddle and Dorchester in
Dorset. The first site is on the edge of Egdon Heath, which was the setting
– and perhaps the central character – of The Return Of The Native, and will
lie directly on the area which forms the backdrop for Hardy’s novel Two On
A Tower; the second construction is to be located near Waterston Manor, the
farm house that captured Hardy’s imagination and led to Far From The
Madding Crowd.
The society says that Hardy fans come to Dorset specifically to see the
rural setting of his works. To despoil the landscape with turbines would,
they argue, deter these visitors by ruining the views. Such arguments are
refuted by those who appear to know how the long-dead think, who say that a
nature lover such as Hardy would have approved of wind power.
As a man who held the aesthetic and spiritual value of the countryside in
the highest possible regard it is questionable whether Hardy would have
liked these alien intrusions on his patch. But whether he would or would
not have approved is irrelevant. The world he wrote about is that which his
devotees want to find when they reach west Dorset. To step out of the bus
and see not the sweeping heathland that Clym Yeobright tramped across but a
field of shiny whirling blades is to feel a sense of desecration and loss.
It would be absurd, of course, to prevent progress simply because a writer
has immortalised a part of the country. To be swayed by such considerations
is to risk being called sentimental and foolish. Yet in an instance like
this I’m perfectly happy to be accused of both, and worse. With some
authors, location is little more than the theatre on whose boards their
characters strut their stuff. Jane Austen’s Bath, Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Edinburgh, Dickens’s London – while their presence is essential to the mood
of their novels, these are robust, ever-changing cities where the spirit of
their old selves, captured timelessly in fiction, can still be summoned
today with a bit of imagination.
But the moors abutting the Brontës’s parsonage in Haworth, or the dank
fields and valleys of Ted Hughes’s Yorkshire, or the rolling hills of
Grassic Gibbons’s Mearns are something else altogether. They are fragile,
unique and irreplaceable. Something of their essence creeps into their
characters or creatures, the bond between them bone-deep and indivisible.
Hardy, though, is in a league of his own when it comes to the countryside.
I doubt any British novelist has drawn so powerfully on the land. No-one
who has read The Return Of The Native can ever forget that opening chapter,
in which he portrays Egdon Heath: “A Saturday afternoon in November was
approaching the time of twilight… The face of the heath by its mere
complexion added half-an-hour to eve; it could in like manner retard the
dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated,
and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and
dread.”
Most of us accept that wind farms may be necessary, unlovely though they are.
Yet when they threaten to obliterate a piece of sublime literary heritage
they do more than just ruin the view: they help destroy the very essence
and meaning of the natural world they are meant to be protecting.
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