Tilting at windmills

On the landing of my late aunt’s house hung this watercolour of Holmwood in Surrey, from 1845 according to a note on the back. As a child I used to love studying how a few easy brush strokes describe the form of the mill, how the colours and thinning of the paint capture the particular aerial perspective of the Surrey Weald.

I’m looking at it again from a different perspective. Windmills are common in paintings (particularly from windy countries like England and the Low Countries) and are invariably portrayed as rather beautiful components of our native landscape. They have largely disappeared. No-one bemoans their loss and yet there is a widespread assumption that wind turbines - their successors in harnessing the useful power of the wind - are marring and will destroy our beautiful countryside.

“It’s a question of scale” you might say, but look at how the trees near the mill have been painted deliberately small to increase its scale towering above the fields. Windmills ‘fit in’ to the landscape because they are a physical identifier of the points of greatest wind intensity – they describe what we can’t see. If sited wrongly they would have fallen more quickly into disuse. Reaching for maximum exposure rather than nestling into the landscape for shelter as old farm buildings do they are similarly at one with it. As free-standing objects they reinforce the sense of openness of landscape space.

In the same way, our modern equivalents will have to be sited for maximum benefit rather than scattered randomly over fields and valleys, and as finely honed functional machines they have their own austere beauty.

How effective they are at meeting our energy needs is another matter but on aesthetic grounds they have my vote.