Didcot

Recently I touched on my love of Wessex, the tamed landscape and its sense of history, and our relationship to our surroundings.

Here's a view taken from the summit of the Wittenham Clumps, a bronze age hill fort in Oxfordshire, just above the River Thames, in one of the most gorgeous parts of the world. It represents, and is surrounded by, the gentle natural beauty shaped by millennia of human activity. At its foot nestles a picture postcard English village with its 14th century church; in the distance, beyond the patchwork of hedgerows, fields and copses, you can make out the dreaming spires of Oxford. And then... there's Didcot Power Station. A carbon-dioxide spewing monstrosity dumped in the middle of God's Own Country™...

Not everyone hates it. I do. Give me a forest of wind turbines on a remote and rugged shoreline over this, any day.

Details: Nikon D70, 18-200mm @ 36mm, f/5.6, 1/400s, ISO 200, polariser. 9 August 2006, Wittenham Clumps, Oxfordshire. Placemark.