As rural dramas go, the cast is reassuringly uppercrust: a former Duchess, a Duke who goes by the nickname of ‘Bunter’ and a posse of rich landowners ostracised by furious locals.
Given the setting is the genteel area of North Wiltshire that was close to the inspiration for Jilly Cooper’s fictional Rutshire Chronicles, a series about to hit our screens in the television adaption of her raucous novel Rivals, one might expect the cause of the discord to have a whiff of debauchery about it.
But while sex is not the issue that has thrown a hand grenade into this particular country set, the matter is no less combustible.
Solar panels – specifically, a plan to install a vast complex covering more than 2,000 acres of this picturesque slice of the Cotswolds – have sparked an almighty to-do and the locals are up in arms.
Tracy Worcester, a bona fide Duchess until her 2018 divorce from Henry, the 12th Duke of Beaufort, is one of them.
Looking over Foxley Manor Farm towards Bakers Gorse, where the Lime Down solar farm site is being proposed in the Wiltshire countryside near Malmesbury and Sherston
When she first heard of the proposed scheme her reaction was visceral. ‘I thought why on earth are they not on roofs?’ she tells the Mail. ‘Why put them on valuable land that’s for growing food?’
It is a sentiment she says she shares with the majority of residents.
Earlier this year, they learned that a group of local landowners had agreed to lease areas of their estates, for a minimum £1,000 per acre per year, enabling the creation of a vast solar farm over an area equivalent in size to 1,250 football pitches, creating what one local has called a ‘dystopian vision of steel and glass’ in an area of outstanding national beauty.
Such is the strength of opposition to the development, known as ‘Lime Down Solar’, that earlier this week more than 1,000 people from villages around the proposed site signed an open letter to the nine landowners urging them to ‘put the welfare of their communities above personal profit’.
Or, as Tracy puts it rather more briskly, ‘stop taking the easy ride and saying yes to £1,000 an acre for 40 years’.
Given her vehement opposition to the scheme, it is little surprise that she is among the letter’s many signatories.
In a rather awkward twist, however, one of the landowners it addresses is Henry (better known by locals as ‘Bunter’) to whom she was married for 31 years and is the father of her three children. Tracy, 65, still lives in a home on his 52,000 acre Badminton estate, which hosts the annual horse trials every year.
Tracy Worcester, a bona fide Duchess until her 2018 divorce from Henry, the 12th Duke of Beaufort, is up in arms at the plan
Not that this has stopped the passionate environmentalist from opposing the Lime Solar Project in the strongest terms, including attending a demonstration in Parliament Square earlier this year wielding a ‘Stop Lime Down’ placard.
Talking of her husband’s reaction to her opposition, she told the Mail this week: ‘I haven’t spoken to him about it, but it’s not something that he’d be particularly concerned about. I’m reflecting, what 99 per cent of the local community feels about something that doesn’t make sense on any terms, whether it’s economics or aesthetic, or purely the brutality of having those panels covering miles of countryside.’
Landowners seen to have ‘sold themselves out’ by locals have been refused service in the village shop in Sherston – a community hub that borders the proposed land – while one landowner, Sean Richards, was recently booed out of The Rattlebone, the 16th century inn favoured by a teenage Prince Harry.
Others have found themselves struck off invitation lists for dinner parties and local events.
‘It is sad that it has come to this,’ one local, who asked not to be named, told the Mail. ‘We’re a close knit community, and everyone from dog walkers to farmhands to well-to-do residents feels the same.
‘We all love the countryside, we see ourselves as custodians of its future, and what’s knocked everyone for six is that it’s not penniless farmers who are giving up their land, it’s rich landowners.’
The furore began in March when parish councillor John Buckley was among those to receive an email from Island Green Power (IGP) Ltd – whose chairman is the former Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern – notifying them of a ‘public event’ that Saturday.
In a rather awkward twist, however, one of the landowners is Henry (better known by locals as ‘Bunter’) to whom she was married for 31 years
On the agenda? Plans to cover more than 2,000 acres – intersected by Roman road the Fosse Way, and dotted with ancient trees and patchworks of fields and small family farms – with solar panels the size of double decker buses.
The development would also include an enormous battery storage site the size of 200 shipping containers sited on a hilltop and dwarfing surrounding villages, as well as infrastructure to transport the electricity over 18 miles to a substation at Melksham, from where it would be transferred to the national grid.
‘Despite the fact we had very little notice 300 people turned up to that meeting,’ John recalls.
They had just a few weeks to lodge any observations before IGP submitted its pre-application ‘scoping’ report in July this year. Hundreds did submit their views, although so far the responses have not been published.
Statutory consultees were given 42 days to respond to the Environmental Impact Assessment), including potential flooding, visual effects and impact on protected species. What was clear within days of that first email from IGP was that a schism had opened up between the majority of village residents and landowners committed to the scheme.
According to property search agent Craig Fuller, who lives in Norton, at the heart of the proposed plans, only three of the nine landowners committed to the project are farmers.
‘The rest have inherited the land,’ he says. ‘It has been in their families for generations and in all of those cases they won’t have a view of a single solar panel from their own homes.
‘In two or three cases, those who have signed up for this, if it goes ahead, will promptly sell up and disappear, partly because of the money involved but also because it’ll be tricky for them socially.’
Some of the landowners have been rooted in the area for decades, if not centuries, not least Bunter, who since his divorce from Tracy has installed second wife, former journalist and teacher Georgia Powell at his family seat, Badminton House.
Locals told the Mail that initially he assured them he would take their opposition to the solar scheme on board, but then offered an additional 44 hectares of land to developers.
The plan would mean a vast complex of solar panels covering more than 2,000 acres of this picturesque slice of the Cotswolds
In a further awkward twist, it is understood that while Miranda, the Dowager Duchess of Beaufort – the second wife of the raffish late 11th Duke and Bunter’s stepmother – has publicly kept a diplomatic silence, she too is opposed to his plans.
‘Her late husband David was a great advocate for the countryside,’ a close friend said. ‘He would be spinning in his grave if he knew what was going on.’
Then there’s Michael and Sarah Badeni. More formally known as Count and Countess Badeni who own a nine-bedroom 15th-century manor on the Wiltshire and Gloucestershire border and have signed over 100 acres of previously tenanted land that adjoins Fosse Way. Among unhappy neighbours whose properties adjoin the land is Alex Frost, chief executive of the Tote and owner of Ladyswood Stud in Sherston.
‘Everyone is vehemently against it,’ he said. ‘It will make a lot of noise and the whole area incredibly unattractive. Lorries will be coming and going along single track lanes for two years.’
Jonny and Georgina Walker are also a husband and wife landowners who have found themselves the subject of local ire after it emerged they had vociferously objected to a proposed solar scheme three years ago – only to willingly put their land into IFP’s even larger scheme this year.
In a lengthy objection placed on Wiltshire council’s website in 2021 Jonny wrote of the ‘long-term detrimental effect it will have on a beautiful and diverse area of the countryside’.
Georgina Walker, daughter of the 14th Lord Napier, pointed out we ‘need to grow British crops on British land’ and asked whether ‘we want to see Wiltshire turned into one big solar park?’
Three years later, it seems their views have done something of U-turn.
The backlash has been profound: protestors’ placards have been defaced. Dairy and beef farmer Ashton Hawker, 62, confides that ‘lifelong friendships have broken down’.
‘There is real division in the local community,’ he adds. ‘I know the people who have decided to go along with this and some of them are friends. They’re honest. They’re doing it for the money.’
Ashton’s insight is all the more piquant because, unlike his peers, he has refused a lucrative offer to lease acres of his own land.
‘I turned it down instantly,’ he reveals. ‘This is a massive development on productive farmland and from my point of view that is completely unacceptable.’
Ashton has won awards for conservation work, helping to establish thriving populations of birds, butterflies, hares and barn owls, but now worries for his future.
‘We have a compulsory purchase for access looming because I won’t fill in and return the forms to allow them to bring the cables on [my land]. They want to dig up a 50 metre wide channel through my land. It might even be pylons. It will devalue my farm, but what can I do to stop it?’ he says.
He is far from the only one to ask that question, because this type of scheme has government blessing.
‘Wiltshire Council voted 75-2 against this scheme,’ Alex Frost points out. ‘If this wasn’t National Infrastructure it would have been blocked but because it goes to government level, you just have no idea.’
Here, there is little love lost for Secretary for State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband, who earlier this year pledged to put climate change ‘front and centre’ of the Labour party’s agenda.
‘It’s a green mask,’ Tracy Worcester insists. ‘A green agenda hijacked by big banks that can make the most money putting harmful products in places where perhaps there’s less people to fight it.’
Many believe this scheme is ‘housing by the back door’ – fearing that when the 40-year projected lifespan of Lime Down is over, the area under the panels will then be designated a brownfield site, giving the green light for vast new housing developments.
Further eyebrows were raised when it emerged that one of the world’s largest infrastructure asset management companies, Macquarie Asset Management, had obtained a 50 percent shareholding in IGP.
An Australian company with a reputation for maximising profit and asset-stripping, Macquarie bought Thames Water in 2006, making it the UK’s biggest privatised water company, and leaving it with a £2 billion debt burden when they finally sold out in 2017.
It must be said that not every local is against the scheme and not everyone believes financial gain is the only motivation for landowners.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, one of the nine landowners who has found themselves the subject of criticism said they ‘genuinely believe’ those who are opposed to the development are ‘a vocal minority’ and that a new proposal being put together by IGP and due to be unveiled in January would try to address a lot of the criticisms from opponents. This would include an additional 150 acres being set aside to encourage biodiversity.
Others have spoken out in favour of a project they believe is the only long term solution to energy provision, among them Chippenham independent councillor Matthew Short, who has addressed many of the arguments against solar panels and points out that currently Wiltshire only generates 38 percent of electricity demand from renewables, less than the national average of 43 per cent.
‘We’re living in an era of cognitive dissonance where lack of knowledge and double standards by MPs and Wiltshire Cabinet members is extremely frustrating,’ he writes.
Those views are echoed by others on social media sites, many of whom accuse objectors of ‘nimbyism’.
It is an accusation that parish councillor John Buckley robustly refutes. ‘I don’t live within sight of the planned development but this affects so many people,’ he points out.
‘People all over to enjoy this beautiful landscape, and what is being proposed will affect the way this landscape looks for generations.’
For the current generation, a decision is likely in the next two years. Further consultations, including with the National Infrastructure Planning Inspectorate will follow before Ed Miliband has the final say on whether to grant a Development Consent Order, likely towards the end of 2025 or early 2026. If he gives the green light, work could begin as soon as 2027.
Many are praying it does not come to that. ‘Listen to what the people are saying,’ pleads Tracy. ‘They do not want to have Britain drowned in enormous shiny solar panels. They want the countryside to be beautiful, and they also want their energy production to make sense.’
