Country Diary
Angela Harding's Wild Light, watching lapwings on a winter walk and the farmland that could become a solar farm...
Wild Light
Artist Angela Harding lives in the village of Wing and her new book, Wild Light: A Printmaker’s Day & Night, is a delight.
Her nature prints regularly appear in magazines and on book covers, including Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path and James Rebanks’ English Pastoral.
Wing is the next village along from Morcott, within walking distance, and I’ve visited Angela’s studio a couple of times, once in late summer during Rutland Open Studios, and also during winter.
Angela describes in her book the light at different times of the day and in different seasons:
“My studio is at the bottom of the garden. It looks out onto sheep fields and farmland. This is not only the place where I work, but it is where I can watch birds and, if I’m lucky, see hares as I sit at my desk. It is north-facing and three of its sides have large panes of glass so I have good light throughout the day.”
Angela says this light forms the pattern of her working day, which often starts early and sees her walking down the garden to her studio just after dawn.
Winter light
This morning, from the comfort of bed, I’ve watched dawn diffuse cold colours into a clear winter sky.
After a week of freezing nights and crystalline mornings, I’ve been looking forward to the freedom of a weekend walk.
With a happy companion trotting alongside me, Lyra, our Parson Russell Terrier, we set off out of the village on the Wing Road towards Pilton.
At the bottom of the valley, below Morcott, the lane narrows to a brick bridge over a stream.
We stop and watch the icy water slip by. If it wasn’t for the faint surface eddies, it might appear the water had been captured in freeze-frame.
I’ve seen a little egret eyeing the stream here before, but today it is another infrequently seen bird that catches my ear, then my eye.
Over the pasture to the north side of the stream, two lapwings are pursuing each other at hedgerow height, flying at speed and pulling sharp figures of eight. Aerial combat or a ‘chase-me, chase-me’ courting ritual?
It’s the call of the lapwing that’s so curious: a tooting, fluting sound, somewhere between a swanee whistle and a kazoo.
The jousting creates a disturbance that sends a flock of 14 lapwings up into the chilled air, their distinctive black-tipped wings moving in graceful arcs, as they move to the next field.
Lapwings, or peewits as they are also called, were once common farmland birds, but there numbers have declined dramatically with the loss of suitable habitats.
And for this flock, the fields and farmland they are flying over now faces an uncertain future…
Sunlight
Plans for a solar farm on the land between Morcott and Wing, south of the hamlet of Pilton, have been announced.
In total, 80-hectares of pasture and arable farmland have been identified as part of a landholding of more than 1,500-hectares.
It’s a huge area, much of it sitting high on a ridge. The environmental and visual impact would be huge.
But how to balance the need to transition to renewable energy, reducing fossil fuels, without destroying landscapes, degrading the environment and further depleting nature?
Rather rashly, I post my views on social media, sparking a polarising debate about nimbyism (Not In My Back Yard).
Clearly, we need solar and wind power generation and this is inevitably going to impact rural landscapes.
But what makes this so difficult is that while the UK is driving ahead with renewable energy, the lack of government strategy and the willingness (or negligence) to leave everything to free market economics, is creating a new and chaotic renewable energies goldrush.
Start-up energy generators are promising landowners huge amounts of money to lease fields (one farming family told me they would yield four times as much from each field), and then profit significantly from sky-high prices paid by consumers.
In this case, the Staveley Solar Farm would be run in conjunction with Anglian Water, which manages Rutland Water. While Anglian Water – whose shareholders include large overseas investors – would benefit, there would be no direct benefits to the local community.
Surely we should all have a stake in our landscapes and natural resources? And if communities had a stake in local energy generation, perhaps there would be greater willingness to see appropriately-sized developments?
But such extraordinarily large and imposing projects, carpeting agricultural fields with solar panels, could do as much damage as they do good and leave great bitterness.
There will be an exhibition in Wing Village Hall this coming week for the energy company to present its plans.
This is one visit to Wing I’m not looking forward to making.
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