Pylon of the Month

November's pylon comes from Kent, or to be more specific Dungeness which according to Wikipedia is formed largely of a shingle beach in the form of cuspate foreland. I can probably safely assume that the intelligent readers of this blog are well acquainted with cuspate forelands, but just in case the definition isn't on the tip of the tongue, they are "geographical features found on coastlines and lakeshores that are created primarily by longshore drift". More to the point from a pylon perspective, Dungeness is also the site of two non-operational nuclear power station. The first (Dungeness A) is an old Magnox reactor which was commissioned in 1965 and went out of service on the last day of 2006. Dungeness B was an Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (AGR) that was commissioned in 1983 and eventually shut down for good in 2021. AGR reactors never lived up to the hype that accompanied them in the early days:

In May 1965 Fred Lee, minister of power in Harold Wilson’s Labour government, announced that the next phase of Britain’s nuclear power programme would be based on the British-designed advanced gas-cooled reactor (AGR), in preference to the water-cooled reactors that were available from the US. Britain, Lee said, had “hit the jackpot”, with a design that was clearly superior on economic and technical grounds to its American rivals.

The quote above is an excerpt from a review in the Financial Times of 'The Fall and Rise of Nuclear Power in Britain' by Simon Taylor and it looks like an interesting if sobering read especially if like me you think that nuclear energy has a key role to play in decarbonising energy generation in the UK. 

Anyway, back to the pylons and the rather magnificently moody picture of them marching across the landscape. The picture was sent in by someone who confessed in the email by which they arrived, to having developed an irrational fear of pylons. A trip to Dungeness where you  "can touch them, giant gangly bloody things like huge Crane Flies. Buzzing and crackling away" was the therapy and I only hope it worked. The email was sent back at the beginning of 2021 and I'm not sure where the closure of the nuclear power stations now leaves these pylon lines. Perhaps I'll pop down to Kent to investigate when I get a chance. If you've already got information to pass on about the lines you can always get in touch with me on Twitter or Instagram.

Over the last year, travel has been severely restricted for pretty much everyone so it seems fitting that May's Pylon of the Month comes from within walking distance of my house. The picture was taken by a colleague in West Oxford close to Binsey lane, a road that leads from Port Meadow to the Botley Road. Fans of His Dark Materials might be interested to know that Binsey lane features in chapter 11 of The Secret Commonwealth, the second novel in the Book of Dust trilogy. This part of Oxford is ideal for walking, with the added advantage of an excellent pub, The Perch, quite close to the pylon. Next time the weather is set fair on a Sunday, what better way to spend a few hours than a walk around Port Meadow followed by a pint and a pylon.

I like a lot of things about this picture, but even I've got to admit that it clashes somewhat with the idyllic water meadows and dreaming spires that might be conjured up when thinking of Oxford. It's that contrast, however that draws me in and this zone where city and countryside fray into one another is explored in an excellent book, Edgelands, by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts.

The wilderness is much closer than you think. Passed through, negotiated, unnamed, unacknowledged: the edgelands - those familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside - have become the great wild places on our doorsteps. In the same way the Romantic writers taught us to look at hills, lakes and rivers, poets Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts write about mobile masts and gravel pits, business parks and landfill sites, taking the reader on a journey to marvel at these richly mysterious, forgotten regions in our midst.

According this review of the book in the Guardian, the zone goes

"....by different names, few of them complimentary. Victor Hugo called it "bastard countryside". The landscape theorist Alan Berger called it "drosscape". The artist Philip Guston called it "crapola".

Given how close this pylon is to genuinely lovely countryside that's perhaps a bit harsh, but enough of the peripheral, let's discuss the pylon itself.  Long time readers and pylonophiles will have already spotted that it's a terminator pylon and in this case its at the end of the 132 kV line which starts further West in Witney and makes its way to Oxford via Farmoor reservoir. At this point, the voltage will be stepped down to a lower voltage to run either underground or on lower voltage overhead lines to a further network of substations. I'll go and investigate the next time I'm in the vicinity and I'll be sure to have a copy of Edgelands with me to read in the pub afterwards.

The first pylon of 2021 comes from Boars Hill just outside Oxford and was sent to me by a friend after a walk with his wife during the recent cold snap.  The hoar frost on the hedge and the fog¹ made for a wonderfully atmospheric scene that can surely only have been enhanced by the pylon's presence. Boars Hill is a beautiful area for a walk if you are in the Oxford area and was where Matthew Arnold was inspired to write Thyrsis, the poem in which the famous lines that have come to define one misty-eyed² perspective of Oxford.

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires

She needs not June for beauty's heightening

It is clear from the pylon design (PL16?) that this is a 132 kV line and a quick check of the Open Infrastructure Map confirmed this and also showed the lower voltage lines that you can see in the foreground of the picture. In the UK, three phase supply on wooden poles is usually either 11 kV or 33 kV but sadly, the map doesn't specify the voltage on such lowly lines. Interestingly, the 132 kV tower only seems to have a single circuit (3 lines - one for each phase) with two lines on one side of the tower and the third on the opposite side. I'm not sure why so I'll seek out the answer when I tweet this out as @pylonofthemonth

For more about Boars Hill, the Oxford Preservation Trust website is wonderfully informative.  The literary links to the area are legion, with four Poets Laureate having lived there; Robert Bridges, John Masefield, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden. Elizabeth Daryush, the daughter of Robert Bridges, was also a noted poet and the garden of her house on Boars Hill is managed by the Oxford Preservation Trust. A visit there would be just the ticket for any pylon fans with a literary bent.

1. I was going to call it mist until I looked up the difference and according to The Met Office, it turns out to be fog because you can see less than 1,000 metres.
2. Foggy-eyed just doesn't work here.

 This month we have a Scottish pylon from Loch Errochty, a man made freshwater loch in Perth and Kinross.  The pylons are on the Beauly to Denny power line which brings power from renewable sources in the north of Scotland to consumers further south.  It was (and remains) very controversial and the Herald Scotland reported back in 2015 that 'Its impact on the Highland landscape was compared to taking a razor blade to a Rembrandt'.  Those who planned and built it insist that it is essential if Scotland is to meet national renewable energy targets.

You can see a more zoomed out picture below.

Happy New Year to pylon fans everywhere.  After a Christmas break where I failed to get any pylon pictures with accompanying snow and ice I decided to start 2011 with this rather marvellous image taken by a pylon fan very close to Radley, a few miles outside Oxford.  

I like it on a purely visual level and if all you want from Pylon of the Month is a chance to look at pictures of pylons then you might want to stop reading now. ......

because the picture could also be seen as a metaphor for what some see as the battle between science and the arts.  I probably need to explain in a little more detail!  As I discussed in a recent post, pylons are frequently seen as the all to obvious symbols of technology riding roughshod over aesthetic and environmental concerns.  It was Keats who first used the rainbow in the argument between the arts and science when he accused Newton of destroying its beauty by explaining it.  It inspired Richard Dawkins to write 'Unweaving the Rainbow' which argues that understanding actually enhances our appreciation of the beauty rather than destroying it and I'm with him on this one.  Richard Feynman, one of my scientific heroes, also had this to say on the subject:

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

So if you want to appreciate this month's pylon picture on a deeper level, then for more on the origin and background to Keat's comments, I can't recommend Richard Holme's book, 'The Age of Wonder' too highly.  Prior to this book, he was better known as a biographer of Romantic poets but this is an excellent account of the close interplay between science and the arts in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  For an account of the physics behind rainbows, here would be a good starting point.

As December looms, I thought I would mention a book that pylon fans could add to their Christmas list.  The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain De Botton has a whole chapter (called Transmission Engineering) dedicated to pylons.  The author and a member of the Pylon Appreciation Society follow a pylon line from the nuclear power plant in Dungeness all the way to Canning Town whilst musing on life, work and other subjects.  It is really is an excellent book.  One section particularly caught my eye.  It refers to a book (originally published in Dutch although I can find no reference to it) called The Beauty of Electricity Pylons in the Dutch Landscape by Anne Mieke Backer and Arij de Boode.  They make the case for appreciating the beauty of pylons and apparently note that windmills were as unpopular once as pylons are now.  They were occasionally burnt to the ground and denounced from pulpits before the painters of the Dutch Golden Age started including them in their landscapes thereby contributing to their acceptance.  Perhaps the same will be true for pylons in the future.