THE CEFN CROES PHOTO-GALLERY
Rape of an upland plateau

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What has happened on Cefn Croes?

Throughout 2004, as the infrastructure of the wind power station was put in place, Cefn Croes was subjected to a relentless campaign of damage and destruction.

Prior to this, and during the development period, hundreds of thousands of trees - many of them premature crops - had been felled. From February 2004, up to 25 huge excavators, earthmovers, "peckers", rock-grinders, and other heavy plant machinery were on site, as new access roads were made, existing forestry tracks widened, gradients levelled, drainage channels dug, huge foundations excavated, peat bogs ripped up, and new "borrow pits" (quarries) opened up to gain roadstone and aggregate. The base sections of the turbine towers were set in steel-reinforced concrete, ready for the turbine towers - imported from General Electric's factory in Northern Germany. The thousands of tons of concrete were made on-site in a plant which was not part of the original planning application.

Numerous planning conditions were violated:

And then there was the "collateral damage":

  1. From construction of new access roads. Because of the climb from the A44 to the plateau, the 1.7km of new road has three hairpin bends, and because of the size of the low-loaders (42m long, 5m wide), those bends are enormously wide, resulting in heavy and irreparable landscape scarring, made all the more obvious by wide swathes of clear-felling, and by opportunistic quarrying from the adjacent hillside.
  2. From widening of pre-existing forest roads. First there was clear-felling, then banks were ripped up and drainage ditches dug, then roadstone was dumped and levelled. Familiar tracks quickly became unrecognisable, and landmarks were lost.
  3. Habitat loss. Not just little mossy banks with heather, lichens, mosses and saplings, but moorland habitat and grassland.
  4. Peat disturbance and destruction. Peat is one of the world's rarest habitats. One foot depth of it takes one thousand years to develop; peat sequesters within it many millions of tons of CO2, which is released as it is cut and dumped to dry out. Adjacent to turbine 37 is a 2m bank of peat; no amount of restoration can reverse damage on this scale.
  5. Hydrology disturbance. Streams blocked, polluted and diverted. The run-off from workings drained into previously pristine streams and rivers.
  6. Wildlife disturbance. Especially to birds, due to noise and pollution close to nesting sites during the breeding season.
  7. Peripheral damage.
    Off-site, due to:
    Vehicle emissions, pollution, noise, dust and vibration from thousands of HGV movements, bringing in aggregates, site cabins, cranes, and cement; and from enormous low-loaders bringing the turbine components themselves, with police escorts and queues of slow traffic;
    Physical damage from passing heavy traffic, to buildings, bridges and drains, road surfaces;
    Economic damage through disruption of commercial and tourist traffic, and the communities through which they passed.
  8. From the grid connection.
    Large sub-station compound on-site
    Underground trenches for cables between turbines
    Pylons and overhead cables
    Expansion of pre-existing sub-station
    New power lines (14km) to take electricity to grid

Who is to blame?

All the "stakeholders" who acquiesced in (decided not to object to) the proposals, and those who positively supported the plans:

Who monitored what went on, and DID ANYBODY CARE?

The Forestry Commission certainly didn't: delays "adversely affected their cashflow" - as landowners they got nothing until the electricity started flowing.

The Countryside Council for Wales toed the National Assembly for Wales line. They were embarrassed by Cefn Croes but did not monitor what was done.

RSPB says it didn't have enough money to watch events unfold.

ADAS is upset about depradations to the land it leases - a bit late now!

Yet this is industrialisation of Ceredigion on a massive scale ....

Who takes responsibility for the environmental damage?

Shifting responsibility is the name of the game. No-one wanted to know, even though it isn't possible to mitigate the damage done. So where are the accountable politicians, councillors, complacent civil servants and quango bosses?

THE GALLERY
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2000
1
Cefn Croes from Pen-y-garn, with Plynlimon on the left skyline. It is July, and the peace is broken only by the skylarks, and a light breeze blowing through the grass. But storm-clouds are gathering...
 
2004
2
Along comes Jones
2A
 
Now that the Forestry Commission has diversified into windfarm facilitation, we can start getting rid of all those trees...
3
4
5
 
Next we'll do a little sensitive upgrading of the forest roads up onto the plateau, and then we'll get stuck into the moorland
6
7
8
9
10
11

12

13

14
15
16
17
Roadside embankments - before and after
  
18
19
20
Dirt roads become super-highways
  
20A
Repairing a landslip		    
 
All that roadstone has to come from somewhere, but we don't want to buy it from local quarries. Instead we'll open up a few quarries on the plateau, and call them something else (how about "borrow pits"?) and hope that nobody notices.
21  22
 
Peat? Well, it may have taken thousands of years to form, but you can't let sentiment stand in the way of progress...
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
    
 
Make way for the overhead power-lines
30
31
 
Of course when we said we'd be sourcing our concrete locally, we didn't actually mean we'd be buying it locally, just making it very locally
33
34
35
 
Of course you can trust us to make sure the hydrology and watercourses aren't damaged
43
44
45
Straw bale, intended to stop concrete slurry getting into streams - not very successfully!
46
Upland stream - before and after the Jones Bros. treatment
46A
Drainage channel carved through peat - and another useless straw bale
 
Scars on the landscape? Well, you can't make an omelette without breaking one or two dispensable eggs
47
48
49
 
The two pictures above are (unbelievable but true!) of the same place - now a site compound
50
    
 
Turbine foundations
36
37
38
39
40
41
 
42
  
 
Summertime, and the driving ain't easy...
51
 52
53
54
 55
56
57
58
 
One-eyed alien monsters
59
 60
61
62
 63
65
66

67
An alien caught without its clothes!

 67A
Nosecone awaiting its blades
 
Meanwhile, 14km of power line is being draped across the foothills of Plynlimon
L1
 L2
L3
Dinas reservoir
L4
 Only a minority of the pylons are the single-pole trident design depicted in the Environmental Impact Assessment - on whose basis permission was granted  
 
A race with the winter
68
Turbines 8 & 10 - the first with blades - Sept 2004
 69
Some happy travellers follow a convoy of blades through Newtown
70
Blades at Eisteddfa
71
Reversing off the A44 to avoid hairpins
 72
October 2004
73
Hiding the evidence: ripped-up peat is spread to cover the site of the concrete plant
74
November 2004		 75 76
77 78
Note extensive excavation & lake, parked-up blade, arc-lights for night-working		 79
Compacted landing-pad (30m x 30m) for blade assembly - soon to be hidden under a thin smear of dead peat
80
Last blade assembly (T39) shortly before lifting into place		    
 
Gentle footprint? Or Vandalism?
July 2000
1
 December 2004
same view81		 82
Car shows scale
83
Pen y Garn from
Cefn Croes
84
Cefn Croes from
Pen y Garn
CG

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