Kilbraur Wind Farm

On Saturday we drove up to the Kilbraur wind farm development which extends across miles of open moorland a few miles northwest of Golspie. It's a bit like being on a huge industrial site, with all the....

....warning and information notices but with the actual working bits only occupying a tiny area of what is....

....a bleak landscape. Bleak it may be but humans have been working it for years. Today, as well as being a wind 'farm', it's part of a working cattle and sheep farm but there are plenty of signs of....

....older farming activities. We've seen ploughs cast side like this before - Glendrian on Ardnamurchan springs to mind - where the farmer seems to have suddenly given up on an almost hopeless task and, perhaps, set off for a new life in Australia or Canada. However, the farming is even older. Scattered along one ridge are the remains of Iron Age roundhouses: finding them was one of the man purposes of the visit and we failed, so we'll be back.

We followed the track into the heart of the 'farm', sited at the summit of a ridge beyond which the land falls towards Strath Brora. The towers were huge, far bigger than anything we've experienced before, and when we stood under them the blades made a not unpleasant 'whooshing' sound as they turned.

There were birds aplenty around the turbines - pipits, skylarks, wheatears and, near the lochan, lapwings - but no sign of any corpses created by collisions with the blades. It seemed to us that the birds had learned to fly a little lower.

The whole site seemed very neat and caring so, for example, there was no danger of our being unable to find our way off the site. The only distressing note was this sheep which had, as sheep so often do, managed to get itself on the wrong side of a fence and wanted to get back to its friends. 

There are 27 turbines on the farm. What seems to me to be particularly good about this development is that it's a co-operative with over 500 members - more details here.