Windy Miller

Categories: places

Date: 26 September 2010 19:00:23

We took a bit of time out to take advantage of the nice weather (and the fact that we have a bank holiday tomorrow so can make up time then - the forecast isn't so good, which proves it is a proper bank holiday :D) and visited somewhere I've wanted to see for a while. Just a short drive south of Glasgow you come to Eaglesham Moor, home to Europe's biggest windfarm, Whitelee. It has trails and tracks throughout the windfarm, plus Visitor Centre with exhibition and cafe, and lots of people were using it as a handy day out.

We saw loads of families with young kids, either all on bikes or walking, and plenty of dogs being walked too. It was great for fatties like me who don't really do hills, as the trails were all quite gentle. There's something about windfarms that is really compelling - I find standing under or amongst the turbines quite awe-inspiring. I remember the first time I was near a modern windfarm, 9 years ago I think when I had a brief holiday with a friend in the Lake District and there was a windfarm between the home of the family we were staying with and the coast, so we did a couple of walks through it to get to the beach. The sound of the turbines slicing through the air is quite spooky, but also very calming. Today it felt the same, but it was on such a larger scale (there are 140 turbines there, about 500m apart), everywhere you turned there were more turbines, and somehow it reminded me of being in a vast cathedral. I don't know, I remember the only time I went to Durham Cathedral and saw the huge pillars that my friend described as having been hewn by giants and just got the sense of how big the place was, and I felt the same today at Whitelee. It was quite a spiritual experience, actually.

We also saw at one point a couple of raptors, one came close enough that we could see it had a great big ole wingspan and was really massive, but as neither of us are twitchers we couldn't identify it. I'd like to think we saw an eagle, but having looked at Google Images we think it was probably a buzzard. Whatever, it was huge! Of course I spent so much time faffing around trying to get my long lens out of the bag that it had flown off by the time I'd attached it to my camera, so no pictures of that sadly. I took nearly 100 pictures (surprise), but have just put a few of them in a flickr set. They're running a photo competition so I'm going to have a think about which ones I think are the best and enter them. Well, if you're not in it you won't win it! :)