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 19 Burnt Hill Flat SD 96914 34954 ///elder.health.arching
This blog describes incompetence by CWF Ltd and Logika, observes the refusal of the Planning Inspectorate to scope out accidents and disasters from the EIA, and notes the failure of CWF Ltd to publish the Statement of Community Consultation in November 2025. It was given to Marc Davis, Growth Director of Logika and Christian Egal Project Director of CWF Ltd for advance comment on 8 December 2025.
27 November 2025 It is the one good day in a run of very wet ones, and the dog and I are going down what used to be the steepest delivery spur of the old CWF, to T19, tucked into the top of Walshaw Dean. It is a steady 10% gradient on the nose of Burnt Hill, steeper than a haulier would advise on an aggregate track. Since our last visit, Christian Egal has ramped up delivery gradients on CEP to 26% (T22 in Black Clough) and every turbine component must be hauled up a 21% section before the delicate traverse across the Nan Hole Clough peat slide zone under Crow Hill. These 20%+ gradients for turbine siting and tracks have no precedent in existing wind farms.
I always think the quickest way is by the trig point and the weird sculpture park at Alcomden Stones, so we find ourselves again deep in the excellent active bog on the NW-side of the nose, but at least we discover the drainage gurgling past the site. This water will be gobbled up by the access track and accelerated into the reservoir, and the active bog will dry out. This stream is not on the hydrology map as a watercourse, but if Christian Egal insists on building so much of his wind farm over the edges, he will bump into a lot of unmapped watercourses on Walshaw Moor. There is a bigger unmapped stream running right through the site of T21.
At T19 the peat is 90 cm deep. The dark shadow is Grey Fosse Clough. Note the quality of the dry-stone wall, now owned by Yorkshire Water. Photo: Nick MacKinnonAs the photograph shows, the terrain on the other side of Walshaw Dean is even steeper in this tight end of the Dean, but with insatiable greed for 300 MW, Christian Egal and Christopher ‘440 Kelvin-Volts’ Wilson need to pack the turbines in, so many are perched on absurdly steep ground.
T12 is not the record breaker. In a failed attempt to hide it from Wuthering Heights, T20 has tumbled over Withins Height edge onto at least 26% ground. For comparison, the steepest turbine on Scout Moor is 11% on the Great Ding where it is an outlier, because almost all of Scout Moor is built right on the plateau. The construction on Scout Moor was difficult enough without seeking out 20%+ sites down long steep spurs. CWF Ltd asked Logika to write them a scoping report on a layout that was untenable and this partially explains the incompetence of the outcome, but Logika’s onshore inexperience, desire to please, haste, and A.I. corner-cutting made their own dismal contribution to the fiasco.
For a company that is in such a rush, CWF Ltd have been very slow to publish the Statement of Community Consultation, due in November 2025 according to their own Programme Document. It may be unusually difficult to write, because under the Planning Act 2008 the preparation of the statement “must have regard to any response to consultation under subsection (2) that is received by the applicant before the deadline imposed by subsection (3).” I know the community pointed out during the non-statutory consultation that the aggregates were too soft, T21 was too near the Pennine Way, the whole wind farm was grossly overcrowded, specific turbine locations would raise the flood risk in Hebden Bridge, and the access route was over an area prone to catastrophic peat slides. All that has been presented in these blogs. You can judge the intricate expertise of what Jenny Shepherd and Ban-the-Burn will have said in response to the non-statutory consultation by reading the Wadsworth PC response to the Scoping Report on the Planning Inspectorate website.
Logika asked to ‘scope out’ accidents and disasters with this bit of A.I. boilerplate:
‘ ‘Accidents’ are considered to be an occurrence resulting from uncontrolled events in the course of construction and operation of a development (e.g. major emission, fire or explosion). ‘Disasters’ are considered to be naturally occurring extreme weather events or ground related hazard events (e.g. subsidence, landslide, earthquake). Given the nature and type of development, it is considered that the Proposed Development is unlikely to result in any type of major accident/ disaster. […] Therefore, no impact assessment will be undertaken and instead will be considered within separate appendices as part of the DCO application.’
The Planning Inspectorate were not having it.
‘The Inspectorate deems that there are a number of matters which have not been assessed at this stage which may give rise to effects where the effectiveness of mitigation is not certain. Noting this, the Inspectorate is not content to scope out [disasters and accidents] at this time. The ES should seek to include this assessment, consult with relevant consultation bodies, secure mitigation if required and demonstrate that significant effects are unlikely before scoping this matter out.’
We were rung up this week by a group considering another Pennine wind farm whose developer is a national name. They had never heard of Christopher Wilson. I said, “Because Walshaw Moor is SPA, SAC and what should be an immortal cultural landscape, only inexperienced developers and consultants would be trying to develop it. The mess CWF Ltd and Logika have made of their own application was inevitable. All the reputable companies and experienced onshore consultancies you have heard of are working on much simpler sites than Walshaw Moor.”
I could show the foundations, crane hardstandings, temporary laydowns and access tracks on this map, but T12, T13 and T20 are on such extreme ground that there is no reputable precedent for the required destruction. Further, since no wind farm has ever been built in a Special Area of Conservation for irreplaceable habitats, these 18%+ sites are doubly removed from the work of expert developers and engineers.
There is also no precedent for T21 by the Pennine Way, and Natural England have said it must be at least “fall distance plus 10%” (220 metres) back from the national trail. This puts it in the Black Clough drainage fan and on 180 cm peat. In a reputable wind farm application on a suitable site, T20 and T21 would be up on Round Hill and Withins Height, but Christian Egal has stated that CEP is “within the Brontë Country” of which Top Withins, marked by the blue star, is the epicentre. Despite being shoved over the edge, most of T20 would still loom over Wuthering Heights.
The dog and I go directly to Withins Height on the way back, and it is firm all the way until the saturated plateau, into which Christian Egal will be inserting a storm drain like a bath overflow. With Top Withins less than a hundred metres away, the nine small turbines of Ovenden Moor Wind Farm are wholly visible, and I wonder for the first time what can be seen of them from Wuthering Heights.
In the next minute, OMWF disappears, not, in my father-in-law’s favourite expression “like the demon king in a pantomime” but gradually, like the von Trapp family singers performing So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, good night. Pylons and tips disappear one by one, until a single blade is not waving but drowning and then as you arrive at Top Withins, it’s gone. It is a magic trick, and here’s how it works.
The consistency of the 440-metre plateau is caused by sand settling in a vast tropical estuary in the late afternoon of the Carboniferous, when a coelacanth could drift the sea floor between Withins Height and Nab Hill trig points, using its electro-sensitive nose to find squid and eels. From the Withins plateau (440 m) over Oxenhope Stoop Hill (445 m) you see almost the whole 105 metre height of the OMWF pylons (440 m at base). The disappearing act happens as you drop the last 20 metres to the ruin of Wuthering Heights at Top Withins, and the calculation, like the effect, is delicate.
TW is at 420 metres, and in the direction of OMWF, the TW skyline is the 442 m edge around the summit of Oxenhope Stoop Hill, 22 metres higher than TW and 1195 m away. The OMWF tip height is 105 metres, and the altitude of the base of the most visible turbine is 441 metres, so the tip is 126 metres higher than TW, and is 6721 metres away. By similar triangles, OSH obscures anything at OMWF that is lower than 6721/1195×22 = 124 metres above TW.
It seems we should still see 2 metres of blade tip at Top Withens, but the similar triangles calculation assumes a flat Earth. The curvature drops OMWF about 3 metres, so the last blade tip disappears just as you arrive and sit down.
We could use the observation in reverse to estimate our planet’s circumference, a version of the horizon method of Posidonius (c 90 BC) though refraction (causing a mirage) affects horizontal methods , because you can ‘see round the corner’. The vertical method of Eratosthenes (c. 200 BC) compared a deep well at Aswan on the Tropic of Cancer which, like a pinhole camera, formed an image of the sun at noon on the summer solstice, and the shadow of a stick at Alexandria to the north on the same day. Eratosthenes’ answer was only 0.6% out: is it the cleverest thing anyone has done so far?
If you approach Top Withins from the south, as Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath did with Ted’s uncle Walter, OMWF magically disappears. If you approach from the north as Emily Brontë did, OMWF is invisible until you take a few steps beyond Wuthering Heights onto the moor. Of course, had Ovenden Moor used the 200-metre tip height of CEP, the top half of the turbines would have been visible at Wuthering Heights. The ruin and sycamores at Top Withins are a key receptor for CEP, modelled as such in the 2023 Scoping Report, and the invisibility of OMWF is an important consideration when the gross intrusion of the 200 metre turbines is compared. Planning permission was granted for a 115-metre tip height at OMWF; I think the perfect 105-metre tip height that was used was quietly determined by the view from Wuthering Heights. They had permission to intrude a little, but they did not.
Calderdale Energy Park, as laid out by Christian Egal on 21 February 2025, would give the visitor to Wuthering Heights a shocking experience. From Hebden Bridge they would pass through an intense turbine field, with the pylons constantly crossing each other, and one set of blades directly overhead at T21. Coming up from Haworth by the Brontë Bridge and waterfall, the turbines would supervise the visitor all the way from the Grade I listed Parsonage to Wuthering Heights itself. The most charismatic approach of all, along the Brontë skyline and watershed with the peat hard frozen under snow would be completely industrialised.
Calderdale Energy Park is an outrageous imposition on the Pennine Way and destroys Brontë Country. CWF Ltd will never show the dynamic effect unless forced to do so, and it cannot be conveyed by the small number of cheap static visualisations that they will be required to provide, so we must do it, and we have put the matter in the hands of our wizard Harry, who unlike Logika is an A.I. native. When we asked him (at the site of T4 on the Raven Stones) to make a prototype of what will be a first in pre-application wind farm visualisation, he said, “I’ll have it done by tomorrow morning. You wouldn’t believe how quick it is to code now.” If Executive Chairman Christopher ‘440 Kelvin-Volts’ Wilson doesn’t like our film, he can show us his, perhaps at a triple premiere on Valentine’s Day 2026: our Harry, poor-old 440-KV, and Emerald Fennell.
Sylvia Plath wrote notes about both ways to Wuthering Heights (Journals p 589) and I shall transcribe them here so I can find them again for the response to the EIA Culture & Heritage chapter, if it ever appears. She had met Ted Hughes at a party on 25 February 1956. What she wrote the following morning is one of the greatest diary entries. They were married on 16 June, and spent September at Ted’s parents’ house, The Beacon in Heptonstall, walking every day on Walshaw Moor.
‘There are two ways to the stone house, both tiresome. One, the public route from the town along green pastureland over stone stiles to the voluble white cataract that drops its long rag of water over rocks warped round, green-slimed, across a wooden footbridge to terrain of goatfoot-flattened grasses where a carriage road ran a hundred years back in a time, grand with the quick of their shaping tongues worn down to broken wall, old cellar hole, gate pillars leading from sheep turf to grouse country. The old carriage road’s a sunk rut, the spring clear well & gurgle under grass too green to believe. The hulk of matted grey hair & a long skull to mark a sheepfold, a track worn, losing itself, but not lost.
The other – across the slow heave, hill on hill from any other direction across bog down to the middle of the world, green-slimed, boots squelchy – brown peat – earth untouched except by grouse foot – bluewhite spines of gorse, the burnt sugar bracken – all eternity, wildness, loneliness – peat-coloured water – the house – small, lasting – pebbles on roof, name scrawls on rock – inhospitable two trees on the lee side of the hill where the long winds come, piece the light in a stillness. The furious ghosts nowhere but in the heads of the visitors & the yellow-eyed shag sheep[.] House of love lasts as long as love in human mind – blue spindling gorse.’
Out of her extensive exploration with Ted Hughes, she made her poem ‘Wuthering Heights’ with a line to which every Walshaw bosom returns an echo: “The sky leans on me, me, the one upright/Among all horizontals”. Some of Plath’s greatest work is inspired by Walshaw Moor, and she spent hours making the drawing of Top Withins shown below.
The forty-or-so Plath poems that will live for as long as people read were written in two periods. The first is 14 February 1961 (‘Zoo-keeper’s Wife’) to 23 October 1961 (‘Mirror’) and this includes ‘Wuthering Heights’. The second is 3 October 1962 (‘The Bee Meeting’) through ‘Daddy’ to ‘Lady Lazarus’ on 29 October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis ended. She wrote a poem a day in that fraught October, “at 4 a.m. because that’s the very worst time.” One of them is ‘Cut’, a thumbnail history of American wars from the Mayflower to Korea and the Sex War. Clive James said: “If she could do that, she could have done anything.” Sylvia Plath’s October 1962 may be the most extraordinary divine frenzy that any human has ever experienced, and she was a single mother caring for nine-month-old Nicholas and two-year-old Frieda. If you emerged from such an ecstatic state, you might well fear that it might never come again.
The cultural heritage of Walshaw Moor was an inspiration for four of the most famous women in the history of the world: Charlotte (39), Emily (30) and Anne Brontë (29) and Sylvia Plath (30). Charlotte and Emily are buried at Haworth and Sylvia in Heptonstall. Calderdale Energy Park turbines would stare at their graves.
For decades, the international SPA and SAC designations have protected this unique and world-famous cultural heritage. Now that landscape heritage must play its part in protecting irreplaceable habitats and growing assemblages of lapwings, golden plovers and curlews that breed on Walshaw Moor.
If Labour ministers understand and respect nature then Walshaw Moor will not be destroyed. If Labour ministers understand and respect the work of these world-famous women then Walshaw Moor will not be destroyed.
Our society has become saturated with gambling. There is enough doubt about both those statements to give the necessary edge to the odds, and if CWF Ltd lose, the losses can be written off against UK tax owed by the parent company, so they are playing a fruit machine with our money. Calderdale Energy Park is a venture capital gamble on a vast privately-owned estate, financed directly by the sale of fossil fuels in a country whose women must submit to male guardianship. Indirectly, the money comes from tax-payers who cover the losses if the gamble fails, and bill-payers who must shoulder the mortgage by paying the gas-determined price if the gamble succeeds. Christian Egal and his team have proved to be remarkably incompetent managers of their own project, but at the heart of the bet, CWF Ltd trades on a shrewd assessment of the Labour Party’s long-standing institutional attitudes to nature and the work of women.
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This is the 50th in a series of guest blogs originally based on the 65 wind turbines which Richard Bannister planned to have erected on Walshaw Moor. Turbines 4CEP, 5, 6, 6CEP, 8, 8CEP, 9, 11, 13CEP, 13, 14CEP, 14, 16, 17, 18CEP, 20CEP, 21, 21CEP, 22CEP, 23CEP, 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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