ack in the 1980s, we moved into a new estate tacked on to the north end of town. For the resettling Londoners who occupied most of the houses, it must have been a strange country. Tiny dragons roamed by day and pinpricks of lunar light lit the embankment beyond our gardens on summer nights. Within a few years, the lizards were gone (did other cats beside our neighbour’s catch them too?) and the glow-worms glowed no more, their memory outshone all year round by an industrial park and the floodlights of an all-weather sports pitch. Later still, another estate extended the concrete ribbon farther north, proving that there was no end to the end. We lived on our stolen rectangle of countryside; now we lamented the loss of the open fields beyond. About the time that we moved away, the occupiers of the outlying estate moved in, to streets haunted by the names of the land’s previous residents – Larks Rise, Partridge Piece, Kestrel Way. Returning on foot for the first time in 20 years, I did not know which garden marked where I last saw a skylark’s ascent, or which factory blocked the flight path of that covey of partridges. One fixture still featured – a footbridge over the railway that had linked one wheat field to another. Now, as then, I mounted its steps for a high view over farmland to the east, flat arable sweeping up into woods and meadows of the ridge. Hitherto, I had only caught glimpses of the fields’ new look from train windows. Now, I scanned the energy crop that had spread towards the hill. Row upon row of solar panels, a choppy series of lakes, girdled by hedges, that stretched out for half a mile. Side on, they were so many sunloungers. Propped on metal struts over close-mown turf, they did not grow from the land, or take from it. A benign miracle brings us power from the sky without plundering the earth or polluting the air, yet I worry over the factory aesthetics, the straight lines, the rectangles, the geometry of development. I dream of solar farm springs where the grass beneath and around grows wild flower meadows and humans give back to nature.