Printed in the Daily Telegraph 11th March (p. 9), and online at www.telegraph.co.uk – an article on Straiton headlined “Picturesque village is facing wind farm ‘catastrophe’ ” by Auslan Cramb, the Telegraph’s Scotland correspondent.

WilloWind is quoted as saying that they are “committed to meaningful consultation and as a result of feedback from the community had cut the number of turbines planned from 29 to 25, which would keep them all more than 1.25 miles (2km) from homes.”

Obviously, we await a new layout plan (nothing new on their website yet), but it seems highly unlikely that they will be able to keep all the 25 turbines “more than 1.25 miles (2km) from homes.” At present, only 9 wind turbines lie outside the 2 km buffer zone. See the map and comment at https://savestraitonforscotland.com/about/linfairn/#Distance

WilloWind don’t seem to be too good at measuring. Or indeed geography generallly. In one section of their initial Scoping report, they described the Linfairn site as being in “East Ayrshire, Scotland, 0.8 km southwest of the village of Straiton …” In another place the location was given as “approximately 1 km south-west of Straiton, South Ayrshire” (right county at least). In another section (Visual Amenity), the report stated that “The nearest main settlement is the village of Straiton, located 4 km to the north of the site boundary..”

This information is courtesy of SNH, who also drily noted that as WilloWind did not provide a layout map “it is not possible to know which of these statements is correct and thus what impact the proposals will have on this settlement.” (see Linfairn final scoping opinion, p. 50 – the document is available on savestraitonforscotland.com/about/linfairn/

Whoops. Perhaps we should buy them a good ruler and a pair of dividers.