It was less than a year ago , maybe six months ago, I can’t remember, fairly recently though…… ish. I noticed a lot of plant machinery and trucks etc working in a field between the A2990 and Molehill Road, with a place called Purchas Wood in the middle of it, a tiny wood not a wood at all, a copse really. Me and Cosmo did check it out on a two birds with one stone walk over there. We did have a look at the wood, which has no foot paths in it what so ever. It is just brambles and very difficult to navigate across.
We also looked at the construction site through the wire grid fence. Thousands I can’t tell you how many solar panels were being installed, acres of them. You can see them from the tops of nearby hills and views through trees and things, and if you get it just right…you can see them with the Kentish Flats offshore wind farm right in the distance out in the sea as well. Me and Cosmo have been over to the solar farm a few times. The last time we went there, he found the back legs of rabbit (I don’t know where its body and front legs were) probably eaten by a fox. I can’t tell him off as he runs about flapping and chewing these legs which are ‘mingin’. Because he is a dog and that is what dogs are made for hoovering up this kind of stuff. In the end I am able to get my foot on them and he looses interest and we move on. I give them a very wide berth on the return and I even trick Cosmo to put him on the lead as we pass their vicinity.
But in the last 2-3 weeks I have noticed again an even larger area of these solar panels being installed. This time in several fields in-between the Brook of Plenty and Knowel Hill. I do sometimes walk through these fields to reach the Woodlands, but with all the work going on it is now closed off. So me and Cosmo outflank the works in a military style manoeuvre not unlike Julius Caesar to go out and then round behind the site to approach it from the back. We can see it very clearly with the woods as protection. It is being installed by a company called British Solar Renewables and I have just looked on their website to see if I can see any news or information about the project. They do have lots of news about Hampshire, Dorset even Canada, but sadly I can find no information about Owl’s Hatch Road, just past the Share and Coulter on the outskirts of Herne Bay.
So the landscape is changing here, no longer fishing in the sea, instead huge turbines collect the wind. The bright yellow rape seed and fields of cabbages are now being replaced by silver metal looking fields collecting the sun.
Power generation more profitable than food?
