Pylon of the Month - July 2024
July 23, 2024
July is a special month in the calendar for pylon fans, because 14th July is Pylon Appreciation Day. I hope everyone marked it in their own special way. I was in Greece on holiday and made sure I nodded appreciatively at a pylon on the island of Lefkada, where I've been before.
July's Pylon of the Month was directed my way on Twitter by @mj_cipher, a fan of the website who informed me that:
It was this very pylon one year go today, where I first discovered Pylon of the Month. Additionally, I hope you can tell that this pylon is unique to all other pylons in the area.
The area in question is Lower Ladysden Farm, a PYO fruit and vegetable farm in the Weald of Kent, a few kilometres East of Horsmonden. What makes the pylon unique? Well, it's a tension pylon which you normally only see when there is a change of direction of the line, but in this case, it's in a long straight row of suspension pylons1. In the photo it looks as if there is a very slight downhill slope and so maybe that's the reason for the tension pylon, but as always I'm all ears if anyone out there has a better explanation.
The Weald of Kent is not an area I know at all well, but the village of Horsmonden near the pylon has an interesting link to technological history. According to Wikipedia:
The village was an important centre of the post-medieval iron industry and the nearby Furnace Pond is one of the largest of the artificial lakes made to provide water power for the works. King Charles I visited the foundry in 1638 to watch a cannon being cast – a bronze four-pounder, forty-two inches long, now preserved in London's White Tower.
Yet another entry on my 'Places to Visit' list..........
Anyway, back to modern technology. With the need to update the National Grid and a new government keen to expedite it, I thought I would point pylon fans at this excellent thread from the ever informative @EngineerLondon on underground cables. Leaving aside the fact that it is many times more expensive than pylons (or towers as he insists on calling them...!), burying cables underground also brings other problems and isn't nearly as straightforward as some people seem to think.
That's enough for one month. See you in August!
1. If you need reminding about tension and suspension pylons, you could do worse than go to Pylon of the Month from February 2017.
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