To gain the high points of Fforest Clud (Radnor Forest), you start from New Radnor and head through the afforested Mutton Dingle, an appropriate name for a landscape feature in a region where sheep far outnumber people. The track leads into and eventually out of extensive spruce plantation. Conifers thin as you climb, giving way to native oak, birch, alder, hawthorn and ash. New growth on the dancing larches is brilliantly green. Long-tailed tits dart continually among the trees, still seeking moss with which to line their marvellously woven nests for rearing late broods. Verges are starred and spangled with tormentil and hawkweed. Green flowers of wood spurge glow against their older foliage; gorse blooms among tree-shadow. It’s that final phase of yellow flowering season. Soon you debouch on to grassland below the fine conical hill of Whimble. Stow your rucksack here and plod unencumbered to the fine bronze age tumulus atop its summit – a magnificent viewpoint. Across the glacial overflow channel of Whinyard Gap, which once carved off Whimble from its parent massif, you can pick out all the features of one of the finest hill groups in the Marches. But it’s to be marred. Bute Energy is planning an enormous wind factory here. Access roads will be scoured across Fforest Clud’s smooth flanks. Thirty-six 220-metre wind turbines are planned across the summit ridges. Each demands more than 2,000 tonnes of concrete, pylons and power lines. Hundreds of acres of solar panels could also adorn the hillsides. Extensive peat deposits – environmentally crucial, and unlike anything I’ve come across outside Black Hill, Kinder and Bleaklow – will be disturbed. Affective value of this magnificent hill dome will be lost for ever. In principle, I ardently support renewable energy. But the UK has a dwindling stock of prime wild country, and this kind of industrial-scale onshore project will mean yet more of it is lost, for ever. Please think again, Bute. The push for net zero does not have to mean losing that which is infinitely precious, wild and fine. This is not nimbyism. It is heartfelt concern for what, once gone, cannot be replaced. We’ve made that mistake too many times, and the whole nation suffered.