Blue Remembered Hills

by Dr Katherine Swift, author of The Morville Hours

Bridgnorth is the gateway to Shropshire. Most of our day visitors, and a great many other visitors who travel by motorway, approach from the West Midlands. For them, Bridgnorth and its surrounding hills are their first glimpse of Shropshire, and it is this view which is, in a very real sense, the poet A.E. Housman's 'blue remembered hills': in his mind's eye, Housman is looking longingly west towards Shropshire from his childhood home in the West Midlands.

To place wind turbines in this crucial position, where they will be visible from as far afield as Wolverhampton, is unthinkable.

'The gateway to Shropshire' - view from the Hermitage, Bridgnorth.
Photo credit: ©kcegginton

Shropshire's future economic progress depends upon tourism; our visitors are attracted by our unspoilt countryside with its literary and historic associations. Do we want our visitors to feel of Shropshire as Housman felt in later life?

The poem ends:

'That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.'

To site wind turbines at Meadowley would be a desecration. Worse than that, it would be economically stupid.

Katherine Swift.