Loving Place

Peat, place, and the fight to save Walshaw Moor - by Clare Shaw

I’m in the Old School Rooms in Haworth, opposite the Parsonage where the Brontës lived, and where English literature was changed forever. It’s one of the places I love most in the world, and it’s one of the reasons I moved here - my home is just 15 minutes away, over the moors towards Hebden Bridge.

Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Jane Eyre were written in Haworth – and the moors are as much a character in the stories as Mr Rochester, or Jane, or Heathcliff. Where I lived in East Lancashire - in Burnley, and later in Brierfield - the West Yorkshire moors were always visible in the distance, and as I grew, they began to feel like home, just as much the rough slopes of Pendle.  

There’s thick fog outside. Inside, the air is humid; the room is packed beyond capacity. We’re here to oppose a multi-million pound proposal to build England’s biggest onshore wind farm on these moors: sixty-five two-hundred metre wind turbines, two-thirds the height of London Eye, with hundreds of miles of road and underground cabling.

Topophilia is the love of place – it might be described as a sense of place, or your mental, emotional, and cognitive ties to a place. I can’t know exactly how other people experience the world, but I know I love places with the same warm, aching depth that I love people. For all of us gathered in that room, and all the people gathered in packed meetings in Hebden Bridge and Old Town, articulating our opposition to the wind farm is a huge task. But it begins with peat.

Peat is black gold. It is formed where rainfall exceeds drainage, and where water-loving plants like sphagnum moss grow. These waterlogged conditions prevent the decomposition of dead vegetation - and, as the dead plants settle, peat forms – rich, spongy, black. This is why peat bogs are vital. Like unburnt coal, unrotted vegetation does not release its carbon – and UK peatlands store 3 billion tonnes of carbon - over twenty times more than forests. In terms of carbon and climate change, they are the UK’s equivalent of the Amazon rain forest.

The MP for Keighley and Ilkley asks the audience if they are from Haworth; around two thirds of the room raise their hands. The rest are from Calderdale, like me, with a few hands from Sheffield and even further beyond. Fittingly, because at 200m tall, the wind turbines will be visible from Sheffield and the Peak District.

I have loved the moors all of my life, But its only in recent years that I became aware of their immense ecological importance. It’s too easy to romanticise them as windswept wilderness, or dismiss them as barren wasteland. But they are crucial habitats. The watery, acidic conditions give rise to specially adapted species, like cottongrass and the carnivorous sundew, and they are a home to endangered ground breeding birds like curlew and skylark, plover and merlin. If that isn’t enough, sphagnum can hold up to 26 times its weight in water, and can offer crucial protection against the floods which hit this area over and over.

I, like most of the people in this room, support renewable energy. I do not support the destruction of peat bogs – not here, not anywhere. There are other, much more appropriate places to site a wind farm: some of them local. The proposed wind farm will destroy peat which has taken over 5000 years to form. Like every wind farm, it will be decommissioned in 25-30 years; peat forms at a rate of 1mm a year.

This is not a local issue. Peat should be protected, and where it is damaged, it should be restored. And the multiple legal protections of the moor and its fragile, vital ecology should stand. If they fall, if this wind farm goes ahead, there are few places in the UK which are safe from development.

This is a campaign which brings together across every political divide and distance, and which focusses not just on Walshaw Moor but on all peat moors. Stronger Together against Calderdale Wind Farm is a federation of seven different groups, including The Boggarts, a collective of artists and writers which I initiated last year – because, with its power to articulate and shape how we view ourselves and the world we live in, art is powerful part of every campaign. As visual artists, novelists, playwrights, film-makers and poets, Boggarts support the wider campaign, whilst we work on our own group projects.  

I’m currently working with poet and novelist Anna Chilvers to curate an anthology of inspired by Walshaw Moor – including established writers and emerging writers like Pascal Petit, David Morley, Michael Malay, Polly Atkin, Ian Humphreys and Amy Liptrot.  There will be peat, birds, archaeology, folklore and foraging; social science and access; right-to-roam and personal histories; perspectives on marginal lives lived in overlooked places. Whilst the anthology begins with Walshaw Moor, it is a wider invitation to recognise the mycorrhizal networks of ecology, community and history which bind us all; and to position art as a peculiarly powerful way of experiencing the world.  

We’ll be formally announcing the anthology – and how you can support it – in the coming month. If you want to support the Stronger Together campaign to Save Walshaw Moor, you can find more information here.  For our paying subscribers, I’ll post poetry prompts to support you in exploring and expressing your own relationship with place. And the last word rightly belongs to Emily, or Cathy, or the moors:

“heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung my out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy”.