Wind farm campaign taken up on Internet

Former East Lancashire man John McLeod, who keeps in touch with news from home on the computer news line, was horrified to learn about plans for the wind farm on Longridge Fell.

He immediately sent his support to local campaigners through the Lancashire Evening Telegraph's international computer links.

Mr McLeod, 71, who left East Lancashire in 1958 to take up a post at an Australian university and then moved on to Canada 10 years later, still returns regularly to his native area and always delights in the beautiful Ribble Valley countryside.

He has first hand experience of wind farms after a visit to see friends in the Californian desert where hundreds of the turbines stand mile after mile. Mr McLeod, who now lives in Saskatoon, said: "I suspect that the monitoring experiment would be the thin end of the wedge and a forest of windmills even makes the nondescript California landscape look ugly, let alone the Ribble Valley - a place of pilgrimage every time I visit the UK.

"Longridge Fell is the first thing you see as you drop into the Ribble Valley and an opening vista such as that should not be destroyed by ugly wind turbines."

Ribble Valley Council are in the process of dealing with a planning application to site a mast on Longridge Fell, near Moor Game Hall Farm, Dutton, which would monitor wind speed and directions over a 12-month period.

Residents and nature lovers are appalled at the plans and have launched a campaign to fight against the possible wind farm project. Mr Geoff Payne from nearby Lennox Farm, Dutton, said: "We were delighted to win support all the way from Canada.

"Mr McLeod will be an official objector to the proposals and we have been told that other letters in support of our campaign are coming in from all over the area."

Councillors are expected to discuss the first stage of the plans on March 7.

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