VILLAGERS are fighting energy company plans to install tens of thousands of solar panels across 24 acres of ancient farmland.

Hadstone Energy wants to install 20,000 of the devices in an area the size of 12 football pitches in Chailey.

The 8MW plant could produce enough energy to power nearly 1,000 homes and comes in response to a Government-led initiative to encourage the production of renewable energy through a Feed in Tariff (FiT).

Locals say the site is unique and “virtually unchanged since 1600” and the land, at Tomkins Farm near Cinder Hill, is viable for food production.

However a spokesman for the energy company said the solar panels would have a “low and transient impact” on the land which has “already seen much change”.

Resident Gaye Forster said: “Imagine the fields with huge with glass panels, rising up to nine feet high beside a popular public footpath. That is what might become of this irreplaceable piece of Sussex countryside.

“Solar is one way of providing renewable energy and reducing the nation's carbon footprint, but it’s essential that it doesn’t add to the other ecological and environmental pressures that are already hurting the countryside.

“It would cut potential food production for at least 25 years on what has been a successful arable and dairy farm, with only limited grazing available under the solar panels.”

Campaign group ‘Stop Industrialising Tomkins Farm’ said developers would need to make “hundreds of trips with heavy lorries” past an open playground and along a lane designated by the council as unsuitable for heavy goods vehicles.

Historian Sally Varlow added: “The area is ringed by small farmsteads at least 400 years old, with ancient trees, meadows and streams.

“Its character is quite unlike other areas. It’s a rare chance to see a landscape structure that remains essentially the same as it was by 1600.”

The campaign group is collecting signatures for a petition against the plans.

James Rowe, of Hadstone Energy, said: “The objectors are talking in very emotive terms about the destruction of ancient farmland, unchanged for 400 years.

“This particular land happens to have an old railway line running by it, overhead electricity lines running across it and prominent modern farm buildings on it, so is far from unchanged.

“Our solar farm will be gone after 25 years and we are putting money aside to remove the panels and frames and to reinstate the land at that time, so we are having a low and transient impact on low-grade farmland that has already seen much change.”

HADSTONE ENERGY: FACTFILE

Hadstone Energy is a London-based firm who worked on the UK's first solar farm in 2011 at Wheal Jane, Cornwall, and has secured government contracts to help the country in its bid to find clean power.

But it was announced this month that just a handful of new solar farms are expected to be installed this year after the government confirmed two solar projects, including one contract won by Hadstone Energy, will be scrapped over cost issues.

In November 2013 the independent company gave a village in Watchfield, near Swindon, £10,000 to revamp its village hall after developing a 24-hectare solar farm site.