From Steven W. Beasley

Monday, 5 May 2025

Chief Planning Officer
Calderdale Council
Planning Services
Town Hall
Crossley Street
Halifax HX1 1UJ

Ref: 23/06010/EIA Calderdale Wind Farm, Wadsworth Moor

2nd May 2025

Dear Sir or Madam

I wish to contest the above application to install a wind power station on Walshaw Moor for the following reasons:

Proposed Developer - Calderdale Energy Park (Company's own title)
Calderdale Energy Park's Community News Letter shows a woman and child roaming in open land depicting three small wind turbines spaced hundreds of yards apart, giving the impression that this is what the wind power station on Walshaw Moor will look like.

Far from it - it is proposed to site 41 huge turbines, bigger than any as yet been built here in the UK, on this moorland location. Mr Bannister, the owner of this moor has sailed close to the wind before in his desire for more greed. The land on which he wishes to erect these monstrous machines already carries protected land status, SPA (special protected area), SSSI (site of special scientific interest), SAC (special area of conservation) etc. but he chooses to ignore such designations as he has done before.

To begin with, there are vast areas of moor close to Walshaw Dean reservoirs that have been 'herring boned' with a network of draining trenches (visible from space on Google Earth) cut to take water away from the peat moor so that lucrative shooters may have easy and dry access to the grouse moors for shooting. This allows any water that would be normally stored in the peat, to run off the land to cause flash flooding lower down the valley.

I was fortunate to be near this site when we suffered heavy rainfall and witnessed the excessive amounts of water rushing off the moor from the 'herring boned' area to engulf the streams and conduits into and around Walshaw Dams. It had to be seen to be believed just how much water was leaving the moor. It came in torrents, bringing with it the peat that had been washed off the moor, leaving new stream channels below the surrounding peat deposits in the process.

There are other areas of the moor where illegal trenches have been dug to drain the peat lands of water so as to allow easy access to the grouse shooter. For instance, besides the old road (Top of Stairs) over on the moor, again there are signs of drainage trenching to relieve the moor of unwanted water for the convenience of the grouse shooters and parking places for vehicles have been created.

One has to ask - how much of the flooding in the lower valley is caused by the illegal trenches that directly allows water to enter streams and rivers more quickly than if it were to remain in the moorland peats naturally.

A few years ago Mr Bannister had a road constructed from the head of Haworth Old Road, above Thurrish Farm, over the moors by Mars Greave to Walshaw village to allow access to his headquarters for his shooting business, based at New Lathe Farm, and to properties nearby where a number of his gamekeepers live. I brought it to the attention of English Nature and they issued an order for the illegal road to be removed and the moor to be restored to its natural state. Bannister had to comply with the order as he was at fault by building this road on protectively designated land. He somehow later acquired permission to construct another road but not before he had been forced to remove the former illegal road.

Now Mr Bannister wishes to ride roughshod over us and the authorities in his quest to lay down miles of roadway and cable trenches across this Nationally Protected moor that is home to threatened species of birds such as Curlew, Snipe, Pewit, Stone Curlew, Raptors, and also home to many invertebrates that these birds feed on.

Nearby Ovenden Moor wind power station, above Halifax, is situated on land that had to be disregarded for any protective designations because of the presence of the wind turbines, associated tracks and trenches. It would normally have been included in the protective designations applicable to adjacent moorland sites in the South Pennines. However, the inspector at Ovenden Moor had to disregard this site from any designations and in his summing up regarded the moorland to the west of the site to be of special significance and should be protected against any development – this included land on Walshaw Moor.

Where land, such as at Ovenden Moor, is interlaced with roads, tracks, cable trenches and deep foundations for the turbines themselves, water run-off is created and the moor is then less likely to absorb any surface water, resulting in erosion.

The Walshaw Moor wind power station is likely to incorporate these problems, only more so because of its intended size.

Firstly, the turbines are designed to be much taller and therefore the foundations will need to greater in every respect – penetrating the ground to greater depths, thereby producing huge sink holes to effectively drain the surrounding moor of ground water. Further, there will be the need to have many miles of roadway to access the turbines, and these, with side gulleys and cable trenches, will drain away any natural ground water through water run-off, or leave lagoons, as is noticeable at Ovenden Moor.

The whole moorland habitat for migratory birds, raptors and invertebrates will be irretrievably lost, for the greed of one man!

If the moor can no longer absorb rainwater in the same quantities as now, then water run-off will be inevitable and any flooding in the lower valleys will be made that much worse with more frequent inundations.
Access to the site is of great concern since existing roads are narrow rural tracks, or lanes, and the turbines are expected to be larger than anything yet produced. Short of widening former ancient country lanes and destroying the rural aspect of the area, access to site will be extremely difficult. There is no easy access to this proposed site whether one approaches it along Haworth Old Road from Hebden Bridge – from Haworth along the old Roman way over to the Stairs to Crimsworth Dean – from Midgehole via the farm access track through National Trust land to Walshaw – from Widdop Gate through Alcomden to Walshaw – or from Cock Hill via the field track to White Hole Farm, where the bridge over the stream has insufficient loading capacity. Access to site is limited to relatively small vehicles and certainly not suitable for huge transporters. It would demand intensive interruption and damage to ancient established lanes and byways, as well as disrupting people's lives that live in the area.

Also the size of this proposed scheme would call for many hundreds of tonnes of aggregates, cements and construction materials to be conveyed to site causing widespread disruption in the area, depleting yet further the diminishing resources within the quarrying and extractive industry.

There are now big questions being asked over the viability of relying too much on renewables following the recent widespread blackouts caused by a serious interruption in electricity supplies in Spain and some parts of Portugal and France. Firstly, it was considered to have been caused by a cyber-attack but it is now being put down to the failed electricity power supplies caused by severe interruptions to wind and solar powered electricity plants on which Spain and its neighbours have become so reliant to generate cheap power.

As a former Rock Drilling Engineer, I am warning people in the lower valleys of Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd to prepare for the worst – If anybody thought things were bad when flooding occurred two or three years ago then gird up your loins in the face of more frequent inundations of immense proportions.

(In addition to running Walshaw Estates, Mr Bannister also controls Boundary Mills Stores).