The place marked ‘Windmill field’ on the deeds to my holding is a special place to me. Being there conjures visions of what the area was like before Henry VIII’s dissolution of the nearby Abbeytown abbey going on for four hundred years ago. My property was the abbey’s mill.

The tops of the mill footings protrude from the ground. Huge granite cobbles, some of which weigh more than a ton, that were all brought by horse and cart from the shore at Skinburness a couple of miles away. After the mill was demolished, over the centuries wind blown dust became a foot of sod covered topsoil which covered the cobbled yard around the mill, but Samson and Goliath, my two huge and hugely powerful Large Black boars, have effortlessly turned it over.

The boars are housed in a pig arc in the field, free to come and go as they please and are continually exposing things long buried and forgotten. I have a small collection of artefacts that I grandly, perhaps grandiosely, refer to as the museum. The mill site is on a small knoll on the Solway plain, and the wind is never totally absent. Even on a calm day like this day it’s whistling through the odd slower growing section in the mostly solid looking looking hedges that I planted in foot and mouth year nearly twenty years ago.

The sloes are blossoming, and there is an elusive, almost tasteable, perfume on the air from their creamy white, frothy flowers. It’s impossible to remain angry or hurt for long when walking there. It’s equally impossible to ignore the boars who expect to be petted because they have been since they could be picked up which isn’t so long ago. If I try to ignore them they lean against me for a rub. Since I’m eight stone and the boys are going on sixty stone each the result is inevitable: they get petted.

I enjoy walking around Windmill field looking for new things that the boars turn up, and on the downwind side of the field the February breeze blows my hair across my face, yet despite the warmth of the sun on my face it’s cool. The acrid smell and taste on the air, at odds with the floral perfume, is that of the testosterone supercharged boars, who can smell the sow in heat in a nearby field, and it prickles the back of the nose and throat. The sow is of course why the boars are at the far side of the field and ignoring me.

It’s a gentle half mile walk around the field, as long as one avoids the most recent excesses of the boars’ delvings for grubs and roots, and I walk it regularly. This day, as I round the far corner of the field, the four wind turbines start up. There was a lot of opposition to them, but their site is adjacent to me and owned by a neighbour I get on with. I came here for peace and solitude, so I refused to get involved.

Mine is the nearest property to the turbines, and, despite all the acrimony and scare stories about how they would destroy my quality of life, they’ve never been an issue to me. The nay sayers who kept harrassing me to sign their petition because, “You’re the nearest property, so it will be more significant when you sign,” were more of a nuisance than the turbines have ever been.

Normally I never see the nay sayers and I see my neighbour near enough every day, so there wasn’t a great deal of thought required. No matter what you do or don’t do you’ll upset some one, so the best thing to do is refuse to discuss the matter. You’ll still upset people, but you won’t be allowing them to waste the time you could be enjoying your surroundings and their absence.

The rhythmically doppler shifted whooshing sound of the turbine blades is slightly out of synchronisation with the rotation of the three bladed turbines because it takes a couple of seconds for the sound to reach me, but it’s quieter than the traffic a mile away, and it’s only when they catch the sun, which is rare, that their shadows or reflections are noticeable. This day, I can see the shadows sweeping swiftly across the ground as the blades point downwards to slow as they reach the top. Maybe I’ll walk round once more, for there’s something very soothing about the turbines.