THE Tomkins Farm, Chailey, solar farm planning application comes before Lewes planning tomorrow, rubber stamped as 'okay' by the planning officer.

Hadstone Energy seek approval to cover about 24 acres of Sussex countryside with solar panels for 25 years.

But the planning grounds for refusal are clear – its harmful impact on the landscape character and the harmful impact on the visual amenity (planning-speak for wrecking the views and enjoyment of the countryside).

On this site, the downside heavily outweighs whatever ‘green’ gains there might be from covering the fields with 20,000 solar panels – in a financial scheme where consumers pay a subsidy to the landowner and developer for 25 years.

This would insert the biggest industrial installation in Chailey into an open, undeveloped, rural landscape.

It sits on rising ground and would be visible from four footpaths. (two of which run alongside the site). Proposed ‘screening hedges’ would be largely ineffective.

These fields are right in the middle of a unique heritage asset.

This is a rare survival of an ancient farmland landscape dating to at least the 1600s.

It is ringed by the most significant concentration of listed Grade II buildings (and one Grade II*) in Chailey.

Within 1km of the site are no less than 19 farmhouses, barns and an oast-house, 13 of them built before 1700.

These dispersed farmsteads are typical of the Low Weald in the 1500s and 1600s.

While none of these buildings individually might justify rejecting this application, the survival of their joint, undeveloped, landscape setting is of historic importance – and it is accessible and currently enjoyed by everyone walking the public footpaths.

Lewes councillors, please do not trash our landscape.

  • Iain Crump is a resident of Cinder Hill, Chailey.