Wuthering blight? Plan for windfarm on moors where Brontës wandered

Heathcliff! It's me, Cathy, I'm up by the wind turbines." It's not quite what Kate Bush had 'in mind, and probably not what Emily Brontë imagined when she wandered the Yorkshire moors and created Wuthering Heights.

- Helen Pidd

But if one of Lancashire's richest men gets his way, vast swathes of moorland in Brontë country could soon be home to England's biggest onshore windfarm. Richard Bannister owns Boundary Outlet, a chain of discount shopping centres, as well as nine square miles of boggy moorland between Haworth and Hebden Bridge that he uses for grouse shooting. He has joined forces with a Saudi-backed company to develop plans to turn the "wily, windy" moor into the Calderdale windfarm.

It would include up to 65 turbines, each up to 200 metres (40 metres taller than Blackpool Tower). The windfarm could, say its backers, generate enough renewable energy to power 286,491 homes for a year and save 426,246 tonnes of carbon annually.

Yet local opposition is building against the project, with particular concerns over the carbon-trapping peat bogs, which also soak up water that would otherwise flow down to the flood-prone valleys below. Others worry about the loss of habitat for nesting birds, especially curlews, lapwings and golden plovers, with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds calling the location "entirely inappropriate".

There are concerns, too, about the effect on the lucrative literary tourist industry, with the Brontë Society saying it would have "a significant and detrimental impact on an iconic local viewpoint and world-renowned landscape".