There are applications for 53 turbines at various stages of the planning
process in Northamptonshire, according to the CPRE, out of a total of 94
that industry bodies estimate for the whole country. No wonder this
landlocked, usually sleepy corner of England – its lack of big towns and
airports adds to the attraction for wind farm developers – is feeling
victimised. And it is fighting back.

I’m standing with Driver and Martin Bradshaw, regional manager for the
National Trust, at its property at Lyveden New Bield. We are outside the
shell of an elaborate, cross-shaped banqueting hall-cum-summer house,
started by Sir Thomas Tresham in the early 1600s but never completed, after
his son and heir disgraced the family by his involvement in the Gunpowder
Plot. It is Grade I listed, as are its extraordinary Elizabethan gardens of
spiral mounts, terracing and canals, considered the best surviving examples
of their kind in Britain.

Despite this pedigree – and Northants, notes Bradshaw, championing the county
where he was born and brought up, has the country’s highest density of
historic houses per head of the population – Lyveden New Bield will soon
have a rival after 500 years of dominating this landscape. Less than a mile
away, on land belonging to the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Gloucester, the
Barnwell Manor Wind Farm wants to erect four giant turbines.

Bradshaw guides us to the centre of the peerless garden and points out a
spindly mobile telephone mast on the skyline. “That is where the turbines
will be, only much taller and much bigger,” he says. It will be impossible
for any visitor to Lyveden to miss them. Planning law protects historic
sites from nearby developments that spoil the setting, and so in January
2011, East Northamptonshire council rejected the plans. But in March of this
year a planning inspector overturned that decision on appeal.

That has prompted the National Trust to join forces with the local authority
and English Heritage (of which the Duke of Gloucester is a former deputy
chairman) in what it describes as a “landmark” challenge in the High Court.
As well as its particular concerns for Lyveden, it is worried about the
implications for all Grade I listed sites in the face of the push to develop
onshore wind energy – with the number of turbines estimated to triple to
10,000 by the end of the decade.

So the question that is being raised in rural Northamptonshire is not whether
wind turbines are a good idea – they are here to stay as part of our
national landscape, like them or loathe them, and the National Trust has
supported their presence on other properties in its custodianship. What is
at stake is the vexed issue of where exactly they should be sited.

The writer Bill Bryson, president of CPRE, warned recently that inappropriate
siting of turbines risks turning people against wind energy. “It is that
word ‘appropriate’ that is important here,” says Mark Bradshaw. “Our appeal
is on a point of law and is about the application of the ‘test of harm’ –
what harm the plans will have on a Grade I listed monument.”

That was a judgment the planning inspector considered in his written response.
He acknowledged the “cultural value” of Lyveden as a site of “national, if
not international, significance”, and accepted that the wind turbines would
be a “distraction” for visitors to the 500-year-old gardens. But when set
against the requirement to increase renewable energy to meet the target of
15 per cent by 2020, he concluded that the harm done was not enough to stop
it going ahead.

The National Trust wants that individual judgment tested by a judge. Bradshaw
can point to a spate of other appeals in the region where different
inspectors have reached the opposite judgment because of the presence of
Grade 1 listed buildings nearby. So there is a lack of clarity.

And that reliance on the verdict of one person, appointed by the Secretary of
State for Communities and Local Government, appears to make a nonsense of
Whitehall’s trumpeting of the “localism” agenda. In the case of Lyveden,
national needs have been allowed to trump local feelings.

The same is true of Northamptonshire generally. Wind farm sites at Bozeat,
Kelmarsh, Boddington, Yelvertoft and Watford Lodge have all been reprieved
by inspectors – a total of 23 turbines – against the wishes of the local
planning authorities. Only one appeal by developers against the council’s
decision – at Harrington – has been turned down.

But isn’t this just another case of not-in-my-backyard? “There is always a bit
of that in any protest,” accepts Bill Driver of CPRE. “The proposals have
divided people locally. Some, for instance, say they like the look of a wind
turbine. But the real problem here is the lack of wind. This wind farm, and
others proposed for Northamptonshire, is not economically viable because
there isn’t enough wind to generate much electricity. What is making it
happen is the very high level of subsidy given to onshore wind.”

A case of speculative developers, then? “Well, I’d say it is not so much the
developers,” says Driver, “as the local landowners who have hit upon wind
farms because they can see there is just so much money to be made out of the
current subsidy regime in an undistinguished county where there aren’t many
of the usual obstacles to putting them up.”