Nick MacKinnon is a freelance teacher of Maths, English and Medieval History, and lives above Haworth, in the last inhabited house before Top Withens = Wuthering Heights. In 1992 he founded the successful Campaign to Save Radio 4 Long Wave while in plaster following a rock-climbing accident on Skye. His poem ‘The metric system’ won the 2013 Forward Prize. His topical verse and satire appears in the Spectator, and his puzzles and problems in the Sunday Times and American Mathematical Monthly. Email: nipmackinnon@gmail.com
Turbine 4 Raven Stones SD 93595 33347 ///skims.native.fermented
Because this blog refers to the incompetence of CWF Ltd and Logika, it was given to them for comment on Monday 10 November 2025.
All Hallows’ Eve 2025 A ring of former mill towns and villages surrounds internationally designated Walshaw Moor. Some are among the most deprived places in the North; some are among the most admired places in Britain.
Once we have walked to T4 Raven Stones we shall bring these two maps together.
We don’t emphasise the visual in this blog, However, on Walshaw Moor there are places where the visual impact must shock the decision maker for CEP, and one of them is at Raven Stones, seen here on the walk from Burnley, at sunset.
Some of the visual and physical destruction and the flooding peril of CEP is apparent in the map below.
The layout of CEP was not the result of a proper design process and T4 Raven Stones is the most destructive turbine in an incompetent layout. T3 and T4 are both terrible sites. They are only included to increase the chances of consent for T1, T2, T5 and T6, access to which is by another track cut through very deep peat up the middle of Field of the Mosses. T4 still needs another 130 metres of cut track (another 1560 m3 of peat, another 120 lorries of gritstone quarry waste and Scottish granite) just to get it far enough from T3 so that the pair don’t damage each other with tangential turbulence thrown off by blade tips going at 200 kph. Because the sites themselves are so steep at 11% and 13%, a huge amount must be excavated to get a level platform for the foundations and hard standings. Onshore wind on irreplaceable habitat is very destructive, most of the destruction is caused by the tracks and cable ducts, and most of the degradation on Walshaw Moor will be in drying and flooding after they have been dug, continuing forever, long after the turbines have failed and been removed. The turbines will start to fail at 15 years, sooner if they are so close packed, but the destruction of the peat is a rolling process for centuries.
Widdop is atmospheric by daylight, and sinister after sunset, especially on All Hallows’ Eve, and I hope it will always engage the imaginations of the people of the mill towns who come out to it. Place names make a gothic quartet: Wicking Slack, The Cludders, Scar Hollow, Boggart Stones. Ted Hughes felt the insistent weirdness: ‘Widdop’ in Remains of Elmet begins “Where there was nothing/ Somebody put a frightened lake.”
The four turbines on the Scout Ridge will say to the people of Burnley on their circular walk: “Get back in line. Walshaw Moor has been taken by oligarchs and their enablers.” Just 30 years will have passed since the triumph of the CRoW Act (2000) gave moorland access to the people of England. A Labour government (a Labour government!) may return it to the oligarchs for destruction before the centenary of the Kinder Scout trespass.
Yorkshire Water have been working on the spillway down from Widdop Reservoir since these blogs began. The bridleway along the dam was meant to reopen yesterday, but the 28 kg Airedale and I arrive at a locked gate. I hoist Teddy onto the jointless wall, flex wrists to initiate an elegant rock-climbing mantelshelf, realise that after all I shall have to use a knee, hip, shoulder, back, roll over like a sausage and hang-drop to the ground. The dog watches this horror show, jumps back down and looks at me sadly through the wrought iron gates. All I can do is climb back over, repeat the lift, get back over again and collapse in a heap. We are now among the High-Victorian stonework that cannot stop an infrastructure-accelerated storm surge in the Greave Clough catchment of Calderdale Energy Park.
Almost all the water going down the spillway comes by the tunnel from Greave Clough. The facts of the hydrology have evaded CWF Ltd from September 2023 until the Scoping Report published on September 2025. Their only half-decent map was abandoned in favour of the abject work of their new consultants Logika. We shall continue to use the Natural Power map until Logika are forced by the Planning Inspectorate and the statutory consultees to do the work properly, as shown below.
Despite his ignorance of this hydrology, Christian Egal, the Project Director of CEP, constructed a turbine layout in a dangerous catchment that would require deep granite-filled trenches, concrete and steel foundations, culverts and cable ducts. He then paraded that lethal ignorance at three public exhibitions, in a podcast and by accepting an incompetent Scoping Report by Logika, whose hydrology work is hapless. Understanding of CEP hydrology has gone backwards since the Natural Power Scoping Report of September 2023, which at least showed the relief on the hydrology map. CWF Ltd had spent £33,000 on site visits prior to the publication of the Logika Scoping Report. Logika did the whole thing from their desks and charged the client £1 million. Nobody, in two years of “iterated layout design,” discovered how the water moves in the most dangerous section of their wind farm. The Environment Agency aren’t having it, and Christian Egal must start again, but only if the investors have retained confidence in their ‘Inspector Clouseau of renewables.’
Joined up thinking
The SPA/SAC on Walshaw Moor is an example of joined up thinking about nature. Much of the English offering to our Kunming-Montreal 30 by 30 commitments to nature is scattered dots that Defra hope can be made to count, but the South Pennine SPA and SAC, is part of the solid, legally protected, 7.1%. The DESNZ/Defra joint report “Unlocking benefits” expresses government policy for Walshaw Moor.
“Under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework the UK has committed to take domestic and international action to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. This effort is supported through action to implement the 23 global targets of the GBF which are to be achieved by 2030. Key commitments under the GBF include protecting at least 30% of land and ocean areas by 2030 (“30 by 30” target), through the expansion and effective management of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, and enhancing sustainability in agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries, and forestry to ensure these sectors contribute positively to biodiversity.
At CBD COP16 in October 2024, the UK confirmed its vision for delivering 30 by 30 in England and published the criteria for land and inland water areas which can count towards this target. At least 7.1% of England’s land has been identified that already meets the 30 by 30 criteria and counts towards the target. This includes Sites of Special Scientific Interest in favourable or unfavourable recovering condition, plus areas of the Public Forest Estate managed for biodiversity.
While it is expected that there is additional land already meeting the criteria, such as NGO reserves, this illustrates the scale of action needed to achieve this target. An action plan for 30 by 30 on land is being developed, to ensure this commitment can be achieved. The aim is to finalise and publish this action plan later in 2025.”
At the apex of nature conservation in England, the South Pennines SAC/SPA is part of the legally protected 7.1% and would be shattered by the industrial complex of CEP. If an incompetent developer can shatter a vast area like the South Pennines SAC/SPA then no land in England is safe enough to count towards the 30 by 30 target.
Natural England and the Walshaw Moor Estate have a shared vision for the restoration of the Walshaw Moor catchment.
“To agree the management of the Walshaw Moor Estate as a beacon of best practice, through the restoration of the moor towards favourable condition to achieve a healthy and resilient ecosystem that supports sustainable land use, internationally, nationally and locally important biodiversity assets, natural flood management and improved water quality; and provides a range of cultural services.”
The Walshaw Moor Estate is more extensive than the CEP site, and the map below shows how important it is to the surrounding towns.
The relationship of the deprived towns and the South Pennine SPA/SAC is not a coincidence. The mill towns grew on the water supplied by the catchment. The geometry of the settlements is determined by the geology of the gritstone. The wealth of the owner’s family, the Bannisters, was made in the textile industry. Richard Bannister’s flair and enterprise developed the Boundary Mill outlet on the site of his family rayon mill, and it brings good work and focus to Colne, but his success depends on public money too: the M65 ends at the Boundary Mill roundabout. Equally, Mr Bannister and his workforce pay tax and National Insurance while other businesses in Colne benefit from the Boundary Mill anchor. This mixed economy between socialised infrastructure and private enterprise, the system in all successful economies, was first conceived by Clement Atlee’s Labour administration, advised by John Maynard Keynes. Amazon parasitise it; they are not paying enough tax for their use of our society, and they undermine businesses like Boundary Mill who do.
Walshaw Moor is also managed under a mixed economy agreement between Natural England and Richard Bannister that began in 2018 and runs until 2042. The improvement in the SAC active bog is slow, but visible at boot level even in seven years. The improvement in the SPA bird life is dramatic, most obviously in the curlews, lapwings and golden plovers, but also in the number and variety of birds of prey and owls. If Natural England are going to let Walshaw Moor be destroyed, they should first identify what was going so well, so that nature-impoverished areas like the whole of Wales (curlews extinct as a breeding population by 2033) can learn from the Silent Spring on a destroyed Walshaw Moor.
The money that is explicitly made on Walshaw Moor is a tiny percentage of what the site supplies to the economy. Quantifying the potential of an intact Walshaw Moor for the communities around it tends to dwell on sheep, tourists and grouse because they can be counted. The economics of carbon sequestration is being developed, but this bean-counting entirely misses the main value.
Assessing the full economic power of Walshaw Moor lies in understanding the revitalisation of the Hebden Bridge area at the south-east. Whatever you think about revitalisation by owner-occupier gentrification of dilapidated houses, most of the communities around Walshaw Moor can benefit from a lot of it for decades before it starts to be a problem, if it is a problem. Normally an urban phenomenon, the unusual rural-urban gentrification around Walshaw Moor is documented and analysed in a 1998 PhD thesis: The Revitalisation of the Hebden Bridge District: Greentified Pennine Rurality by Darren Smith, now Professor of Geography at Loughborough University. If you are curious about this phenomenon, Smith’s account is essential reading.
Before we industrialise what Professor Smith calls “the informal National Park” on Walshaw Moor, we must understand both its central role in revitalisation, as well as why it supports such a density of red-listed birds compared to formal National Parks like the Yorkshire Dales. Then somebody in government must explain why, having understood the history of Hebden Bridge by reading Professor Smith, they are going to slam the door on the potential of the communities in Burnley, Brierfield, Nelson, Colne, Keighley and Halifax because they have no faith in the agency of those people. The same spokesperson can also explain why they are going to eradicate what may be the most successful curlew, lapwing and golden plover story in the UK without working out what the Estate was doing right; and why they are going to punish the temerity of Hebden Bridge for showing the way to billions of pounds of growth by increasing their flood risk and industrialising their natural environment.
Darren Smith’s blueprint describes a process that will continue to drive economic growth around Walshaw Moor. If young people in Burnley, Brierfield, Nelson, Colne, Keighley and Halifax are to be set free for their own heroic phase of gentrification, they need an intact informal national park on Walshaw Moor (the informality is important); 1% of the price of HS2 to be spent on reopening the Colne-Skipton railway on 12 miles of existing track bed; and for the old people running the country to stop telling them they are doomed. It is already happening. The world-famous dazzle of Hebden Bridge can obscure quiet gentrification in Colne and Keighley, where the taxpayers have just beautifully restored the railway station, bringing it up to the standard of the steam railway next door; like Walshaw Moor, KWVR is a beacon for revitalisation. Government must get things some things right before the Keynesian multiplier acts on restored confidence, but more important is not to get things wrong because of unthinking ideology.
Marxists and oligarchs alike hate gentrification by a diverse and free people in a mixed economy. Both assert their absolute purity of their motivation in their quest for a perfect world run by commissars or plutocrats. They have their useful idiots in the populist left and right of mainstream politics, they always attract parasitic opportunists in the business community, and their simplistic ideologies have created misery wherever they have taken hold.
Gentrification in Colne or Keighley will be different from that in Hebden Bridge over sixty years ago, or in Haworth and Oxenhope, for that matter. Diversity is diverse, and young people will do it their own way if we don’t wreck it for them. In Hebden Bridge the ambitious hippies of the 1960s tried to grow tomatoes and cannabis on acid pasture above a thousand feet before turning to carpentry and teaching to pay for their DIY housing improvements. In the more commercial phase of the 1980s, self-employed consultants bought modernised weavers’ cottages because they too worked from home. The pioneer agents of what Professor Smith calls “greentrification” in Burnley and Nelson may be plumbers, ward sisters and influencers rather than advertising executives, consultants and sculptors. Diversity is diverse: it will be different from the 1960s, but Hebden Bridge is proof of concept.
After the CRoW Act (2000) Walshaw Moor no longer separates the people of Lancashire and West Yorkshire. We share a vast open access moorland which has already driven dramatic economic growth after the collapse of the textile industry in Haworth, Hebden Bridge and Trawden, but has far more to do elsewhere, partly because Dr Beeching buggered up the railway at Colne. Similarly, the Natural England-Walshaw Moor Estate agreement gives us all a stake in the spectacular and competent international success story.
No reputable, competent, developer wants the ignominy of destroying Walshaw Moor. No reputable, competent developer wants to be adjacent to Logika’s rotting albatross of a Scoping Report. What is happening on Walshaw Moor is that a disreputable and incompetent venture capitalist start-up is trying to jostle Ed Miliband. Their haste can be seen in every paragraph of their hapless Scoping Report. They couldn’t spare a fortnight to proofread it and have left themselves open to mockery in the industry, because incompetence on this scale degrades everyone who works in renewables. It may be that Logika thought Christian Egal would read Revision 00 and find the worst errors. Instead, the Inspector Clouseau of Renewables sent Revision 00 straight to the Planning Inspectorate, so the statutory consultees had the pleasure of pointing out all the rubbish in public.
Because CWF Ltd and Logika are demonstrably incompetent, and have been unable to argue otherwise, it is going to take a complete meltdown at Natural England and the Environment Agency, at Defra and DESNZ, at the Planning Inspectorate and the councils before the Keystone Kops, Christopher ‘440 Kelvin Volts’ Wilson, Christian ‘The Egal’ Eagle and Dr Ghazi Mohammed Osman are allowed to destroy Walshaw Moor. If you read the expert responses of the statutory consultees to the incompetent Logika Scoping Report you will see that the agencies who protect and promote the wealth and welfare of the British people and secure international nature conservation will not be bullied by these oligarch-sucker-fish-in-a-hurry. The radical incompetence of CWF Ltd shows they can only succeed if the planning system turns out to have been degraded by a Labour government (a Labour government!) to create a habitat for those who would parasitise our society.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven! We who were children at the dawning of the age of Aquarius, must not pull up the ladder by which we ourselves ascended by waving through the industrialisation of Walshaw Moor because we could not be bothered to understand its power and potential for the young.
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This is the 48th in a series of guest blogs originally based on the 65 wind turbines which Richard Bannister planned to have erected on Walshaw Moor. Turbines 5, 6, 6CEP, 8, 8CEP, 9, 11, 13CEP, 13, 14CEP, 14, 16, 17, 18CEP, 20CEP, 21, 21CEP, 22CEP, 25, 25CEP, 27, 29CEP, 31, 32, 33, 33CEP, 34, 34CEP, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 42CEP, 43, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64 and 65 have already been described.
The developers have canned their original 65 wind turbines, quite possibly in response to the public humiliation of having their so-called ‘plan’ publicly shown to be damaging, irrational and probably unlawful. They have come back with a plan for 42 wind turbines and the amazing Nick MacKinnon and friends have regrouped and set off on a new tack too. The series continues.
To see all the blogs – click here.
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