Overview
Background
An application has been made to Herefordshire Council for planning consent to construct a huge solar panel development on land at Acton Beauchamp, a small historic rural community situated between Bromyard and the Malvern Hills National Landscape.
The proposal is out of all proportion to the environment in which it is proposed it is built. It will consist of around 40,000 panels, each around 2.5 metres high spread over an area of around 90 acres and surrounded by a 2.8 metre mesh fence with security cameras and infrared lighting. These will be accompanied by 2.6 metre high store rooms, substations and transformers.
If the application were to be approved, it would radically change the currently rural landscape, harm wildlife, disrupt the views and use of footpaths, destroy the peace and tranquility which so many people have come to value and impinge upon the historic setting of listed buildings and field layouts that have remained largely unchanged for over 100 years.
The majority of local residents are opposed to the development and have formed SABRE – Save Acton Beauchamp’s Rural Environment – to assist with the opposition to this proposed development. SABRE hopes to persuade Herefordshire Council that this is a totally inappropriate development for a rural setting of this nature.
Destruction of a Rural Landscape
Whilst it is undoubtedly true that we do, as a world, need to find alternative methods of generating power, our search for these alternatives must be tempered by common sense. It makes no sense to irreparably damage swathes of our beautiful and peaceful countryside and to build solar panels on productive farmland that is supplying the much needed food that we are repeatedly told is becoming ever more scarce.
Similarly, it makes no sense to drive yet more of nature to the brink of extinction by destroying the habitats in which it thrives and to ruin historic landscapes to the extent that our children, and our children’s children, are left without the wild and peaceful places that we as adults have come to love.
How fields at Acton Beauchamp may look.
From Rural to Industrial
There is a place for solar panel developments, just as there is a place for industry, a place for large scale residential developments and a place for commerce. That place is not in the rural landscape that we should, as a nation, be preserving and treasuring.
The place for solar developments is on the roofs of buildings, around and over car parks, on brownfield sites, down the sides of motorways and in industrial development areas where the power is needed.
Agricultural land should be used for food and not industrial-scale energy production. If we don’t maintain this country’s ability to grow food and feed its people, then empty shelves in shops and supermarkets will become the norm, not the exception.
