Pylon of the Month

The start of the academic year is always very busy and so September slipped by pylonless. October’s Pylon of the Month will hopefully make up for that. It was drawn by a colleague whilst out walking near Northmoor, just to the west of Oxford. Here it is in the wild:

My trusty friend, the Open Infrastructure Map, tells me that this is a pylon on the National grid, Cowley – Seven Springs 400 kV line. The middle cross arm being longer than the ones above and below also, I think, identifies it as an L6 pylon rather than an L2, although to be sure I’d need to know whether or not the cables are bundled in fours (quads). If you too want to play the “is it an L2 or an L6 pylon” game when next out in the countryside then you need to bookmark this Telcontar webpage.

Moving on from the nerdery of pylon spotting, I’ll briefly revisit a topic I’ve written about before – pylons in 20th centrury art & literature. The first depiction of a pylon in the UK is usually considered to be by Tristram Hillier in 1933, only five years after the construction of the national grid began. The ones in the image below are more along the lines of transmission poles than pylons, but until I find the time to discover the first “real” pylon in a work of art this will have to do.

“Pylons was exhibited at the first and only exhibition of the modernist ‘Unit One’ group in London in 1934, where it aroused much interest……….in this painting the three tall pylons carry no wires and their location on the beach is deliberately enigmatic. The attention to detail and relocation of objects from their usual surroundings draw parallels with the work of Dalí and Tanguy. However, unlike those artists, Hillier does not use unlikely objects and improbable landscapes.

In a nice temporal link, 1933 was also the year in which Stanley Snaith, the forgotten pylon poet, wrote his lovely poem:

Pylons

Over the tree’d upland evenly striding,
One after one they lift their serious shapes
That ring with light. The statement of their steel
Contradicts Nature’s softer architecture.
Earth will not accept them as it accepts
A wall, a plough, a church so coloured of earth
It might be some experiment of the soil’s.
Yet are they outposts of the trekking future.
Into the thatch-hung consciousness of hamlets
They blaze new thoughts, new habits. Traditions
Are being trod down like flowers dropped by children.
Already that farm-boy striding and throwing seed
In the shoulder-hinged half-circle Millet knew,
Looks grey with antiquity as his dead forbears,
A half familiar figure out of the Georgics,
Unheeded by these new-world, rational towers.

The fifth line then inspired a 2023 short film made by Suzy Mangion and Katie Mason in which my voice made a very brief apperanace.

That’s all for this month. See you in November!

August’s Pylon of the Month comes from the Sperrin Mountains in Northern Ireland where I spent a few enjoyable days earlier in the month. After the sustained heat in the south of England, it was almost pleasurable to be rained on and to have temperatures about 10 degrees cooler! This pylon is somewhere on or near the Magherafelt – Coolkeeragh 275kV line that runs through the Sperrins, but I was not as punctilious as usual in recording the exact location! The line runs from the Lisahally biomass power station near Derry/Londonderry, the first of its kind in Northern Ireland. There are a lot of wind farms in the Sperrins, something which appears to have caused a fair bit of controversy with this petition claiming that:

Northern Ireland, particularly the Sperrins, is being overwhelmed by wind farms, with insufficient consideration of their drawbacks. The Sperrin region, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), faces the imminent threat of becoming a dumping ground for large, seemingly eco-friendly energy projects. We believe there is currently an unsustainable over-reliance on wind energy development as the primary means to meet renewable energy targets.

The move towards more renewable energy generation is going to make this a common issue over the next few years. It was an issue in the Welsh election earlier in the year, although opposition is often linked to a broader scepticism about net zero targets. It will be interesting to see how this holds up after the heatwaves of this summer. Maybe the recent BBC News story about people living near pylons getting £250 off their electrcity bills will also help. The article mentions a pylon line in Scotland which reminded that this controversy as not new, as readers of the August 2017 post about Beauly to Denny power line might remember! That post featured a poem by Stanley Snaith, one of the less well known pylon poets. Searching for ‘Pylon Poets’ on the internet used to get you straight to Stephen Spender’s (in)famous poem, but a Dorset band called Pylon Poets have now rather taken over the first few pages of Google. Anyway, as it is now nine years since it last featured, maybe some newer readers won’t have met it before so here it is again:

Pylons

Over the tree’d upland evenly striding,
One after one they lift their serious shapes
That ring with light. The statement of their steel
Contradicts Nature’s softer architecture.
Earth will not accept them as it accepts
A wall, a plough, a church so coloured of earth
It might be some experiment of the soil’s.
Yet are they outposts of the trekking future.
Into the thatch-hung consciousness of hamlets
They blaze new thoughts, new habits. Traditions
Are being trod down like flowers dropped by children.
Already that farm-boy striding and throwing seed
In the shoulder-hinged half-circle Millet knew,
Looks grey with antiquity as his dead forbears,
A half familiar figure out of the Georgics,
Unheeded by these new-world, rational towers.

June slipped by in a blur of busyness and with the end of July in sight, a pylon is most definitely needed. This beauty was snapped by a colleague whilst travelling through Jutland in Denmark. I’ve never been there, although in a previous life whilst at the Army Staff College, I did have to study the Battle of Jutland, which, according to this Dan Snow Documentary, was the Naval Disaster That Won WW1. That’s a bit of a clickbait title – the Royal Museums Greenwich claims that “Strategically, the battle had little long-term effect”. If you really want to go down a non-pylon related internet rabbit hole, however, feel free to teach yourself about the Schleswig-Holstein question. On matters electrical, the 475-mile Viking interconnector links Bicker Fen in Lincolnshire with Revsing in southern Jutland and allows the sharing of clean electricity. When I checked whilst writing this article, the live National Grid data showed 1.426 GW being imported via the interconnector.

Anyway, back to the pylon. If you woke up having been kidnapped and saw this pylon out of the car window, you would immediately know you weren’t in the UK. You do occasionally see V-shaped insulator strings in the UK and a previous example of these in September 2024 led to me discovering that they were first developed by Hydro-Québec in 1962-65 for use on their first 735 kV lines, to reduce conductor sway in wind. For more on this, you will need to buy a copy of Charging Ahead: Hydro-Québec and the Future of Electricity. The internet confirms that Jutland is a windy place, so this makes sense. It might also explain the design of the pylon itself, which is of a type called a delta pylon, with a V-shaped top. It turns out that Denmark is quite cutting edge in terms of pylon design. Here is a new design of “power pole” and the T-pylons we have in the UK were designed by Bystrup, a Danish firm. I could keep going, but I will exercise self-restraint and as we are in holiday season, and finish with a letter from the Guardian with a suggestion for a game to play when travelling with young children:

When our children were young, to lighten the boredom of driving on holidays in France, we gave titles to different designs of pylon – such as “perky cat” and “droopy dog”. Perhaps if we had more variety in pylon design in the UK and gave them quirky names, people might learn to love them as well as appreciating their necessity.

That’s all for now. Come back in August for more pylon fun and facts!

April’s Pylon of the Month comes from Morocco, the first time this country has featured on the blog. I took the picture on a recent holiday and in the background you can see the beautiful city of Chefchaouen, the Blue City. You can easily find the pylons by following the path from the city up to the Spanish Mosque, a walk which takes about 20 minutes and gives amazing views of the city and the surrounding Rif mountains.

According to the US International Trade Administration website; ‘Morocco’s energy sector depends heavily on imported hydrocarbons. Currently, the country imports approximately 90 per cent of its energy needs‘, but is aiming to increase renewable energy capacity to 52% of its electricity mix by 2030. There was a plan, the Xlinks project, to bring renewable energy from Morocco to the UK, which could have met 8% of UK energy needs, according to the people behind the project. In 2025, however, the UK government decided not to back the project, which would have seen undersea cables carrying 3.6 GW of power coming ashore in Devon. As I’m sure many readers of this blog will know, the UK relies quite heavily on imported electricity and there are many websites which show live information on the UK National Grid. I think my current favourite is the Energy Dashboard which gives very clear information on imports and exports of electricity. As I write this post on Sunday 26th April, we are importing 7.63 GW from France (2.99 GW), Holland (1.002 GW), Norway (1.398 GW), Belgium (1.016 GW) and Denmark (1.426 GW).

That’s all for now – see you next month!

March’s Pylon of the Month is completely different to anything that has featured on the blog before and features Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, which drew attention to Puerto Rico’s power grid. According to Scientific American:

Dancing linemen who dangled from power poles during the Super Bowl halftime show by Puerto Rican singer Bad Bunny were a pointed reference to the island’s power grid, which has been hit hard by a series of hurricanes and, experts agree, is in dire need of modernization.

Pylon purists, surprised by a post featuring “one of the greatest Latino rappers of all time“, might also be raising their eyebrows at a wooden pole being featuring as pylon of the month. It risks reopening a debate about what constitutes a pylon and how those in the trade refer to them as towers. As the author of this post on the Science and Industry Museum website tells us:

When I joined Electricity North West, one of the first things I learned was that what I’d thought of as ‘pylons’ are actually referred to in the industry as ‘towers’, or to use the full name, steel lattice towers. Calling them pylons in our line of work is a major faux pas!

I hear this argument reasonably often, but Tower of the Month doesn’t scan for me and in any case, I have the might of the Oxford English Dictionary on my side. As you need a subscription to access that, I’ll reassure worried pylon fans instead with a link to a Cambridge online dictionary that defines a pylon as ‘a tall metal structure to which wires carrying electricity are fixed so that they are safely held high above the ground.’ The metal part of that definition, however, remains problematic for this month’s post, so I guess I might have to concede that it’s more of a pole¹ of the month. If that brings a few Bad Bunny fans to the blog, I can deal with accusations of a lack of ideological purity. Normal service will, of course, be resumed next month.

1. But absolutely not a telegraph pole – these only carry telephone cables. Wooden poles in the UK can carry up to 132 kV, but are more usually used for 11 kV, 33 kV and 66 kV lines.

August's Pylon of the Month is one that was sent in by a fan via the blog last year and I've finally got around to using it! I'm going for the one on the right with the mobile phone antennae attached but if you prefer one of the others, then feel free to choose differently. It comes from the west coast of the USA near Seattle and in this case if you really want to exploere the area, it came with a Google map link and the pin marks the camera position looking southwest. The sender noted 'the wide array of antennas on the right hand tower. I'm guessing those include both cellular and emergency services. Servicing them must be a heck of a deal.' That would seem to be the case and it's fairly common practice to use pylons for this purpose. My initial reaction was to wonder whether or not steps had to be taken to prevent electromagnetic interference from the high voltage lines but a few internet searches seem to indicate that this isn't a problem. Having a Washington state pylon made me investigate electricity generation in the area and given the topography, I wasn't too surprised to discover that 'Washington generated more electricity from hydropower than any other state and accounted for 25% of the nation's total utility-scale hydroelectric generation in 2024'. I was more surprised and impressed by the fact that:

By capacity, the Grand Coulee Dam on Washington's Columbia River is the largest power plant in the United States and one of the largest hydroelectric power plants in the world. In 2024, it supplied about 15.4 million megawatt-hours of electricity to 8 western states and Canada.

If I'd had to guess, I would have had the Hoover Dam as the biggest hydroelectric generator in the USA, so even in the summer holidays, every day's a school day, even more so if you watch this documentary about the project to build the dam. 

That's all for August. See you again next month for more pylon fun!

There have been higher quality photographs on Pylon of the Month, but July's pylon was snapped out of a train window over Easter and there is always room on the blog for these serendipitous sightings. The train in question was from Naples and this pylon is therefore in the shadow of Vesuvius because I was on the train to Pompei. It's a well known story – the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD buried Pompei and if you haven't been I'd recommend a visit. Once you've done so, I'd also visit (via train with one change) Herculaneum which is much less crowded and by the sea, so very peaceful in a way that the crowded site of Pompei is not. We did both in a reasonably long day which worked for us. 

Anyway, back to the pylon which is part of the 220 kV Erolano-Torre Nord line (thank you again Open Infrastructure map) originating at the 400 MW CCGT Napoli Levante power station. It's a perfectly ordinary looking pylon, very similar to UK pylons but a bit of exploration on the internet led me to an article about new innovative pylon designs (pylons of the future) and the history of electricity transmission in Italy. It's by Terna, "a leading grid operator for energy transmission, being the largest independent grid operator in Europe". Anyway, given that voltage is named after Alessandro Volta, it shouldn't be a surprise that according to the article, he foresaw the idea of electricity tranmission writing in 1777, “the moving spark could be brought from Como to Milan with the wire suspended above ground by wooden poles planted here and there”. Trying to fact check this quote led me to the book, Design of Electrical Transmission Lines, by Sriram Kalaga and Prasad Yenumula which is available here as a pdf. Reading that should keep anyone wanting more pylons in their life busy, at least until August's pylon appears!