English: Modern wind energy plant in rural scenery. Français : Une éolienne moderne dans un paysage rural. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In front of me is a window with  a view of a slice of countryside beyond the river.  At the right side of that slice, at the edge of a low hill appeared, last week, a white mast and eventually the three, apparently delicate feather-like blades of a compact wind turbine.

It’s one of three that have been put up locally this year and all are individual turbines, not wind-farms, and all appear to have the purpose of supplying farms with power in a modern analogue of the many windmills that farms had centuries ago to grind their corn and often power machinery.

I’m certain that there will be people around here who will have written angry letters to the council complaining about them being blots on the landscape and I wonder whether similar arguments happened when farmers started building windmills (despite their admitedly lower altitude).

While I admit that the larger wind-farms are not attractive and there are certain landscapes in this country that would be ruined by even a single blade sticking up into the view smaller individual turbines like the one I can see now are not ugly in my opinion and their gracefully turning blades can add a certain modernist beauty to relatively featureless landscapes, a blending of the old and the new to remind us that we do live in the 21st century and times move on as they did when the revolutionary new wind powered milling wheels ground their first corn.