BY LIZ HODGKINSON
After the Piddington outcry comes the Diddington debacle. No, not for migrants this time, but for something equally unwelcome to locals: a vast solar farm.
Plans have recently been approved to build a solar farm which will spread across 111 acres of farmland, equivalent to 63 football pitches, just outside this tiny Cambridgeshire village.
Diddington is a one-street, dead-end hamlet just off the A1 and home to around 140 inhabitants. It consists of a row of tiny cottages with an ivy-clad manor house at the end of the road, and it has a church, St Lawrence, and a village hall, but no pubs or shops. Its history goes back to the 11th century, but it has remained miniscule in all that time, and it is often described as the smallest village in Cambridgeshire.
The land for the solar farm has been leased to Cell Energy, Ltd, a company dedicated to delivering solar projects throughout the UK. The farm will supply 35MW of electricity via underground cables to the Anglian Water facility at Grafham Water, a nearby village. The lease will last for 45 years, after which the area – so they say – will be returned to farmland.
Naturally, as one might expect, residents of the surrounding villages have strongly objected to this eyesore being built on former farmland. The parish councils of Southoe, Midloe and Buckden – all within a very few miles of Diddington – argued that greenfield sites should not be used for solar projects until all other options, including brownfield sites, have been fully utilised.
But their protests went unheeded, and at a meeting of Huntingdonshire District Council, the plan was nodded through by 12 votes in favour to just one against. The final say went to Edmund Thornhill, who owns the farmland as well as the entire village of Diddington. One might have thought that as a local landowner he would be against the project, but no. Au contraire, he was right behind it. His point was that the land earmarked for the solar farm had been performing poorly, and that the solar panels constituted the best use for it. He said, ‘This project provides diversified income to support regenerative farming on the rest of the land. Green energy projects remain vital.’
He added, ‘Renewable energy projects are really important, and we want to support energy production over the poorest land.’
Thornhill, whose family have been the area’s landlords for 300 years, was educated at Eton College and the University of Westminster, where he gained a degree in estate management.
Born in 1969, he is called Thornhell on Facebook, where he is described as a multi-millionaire, owner and sole shareholder of Thornhills Estates, who “makes his money through the destruction of OUR countryside while sitting in his Cambridgeshire Estate and campaigning for an increase to his local nature reserve and being a ‘conservationist and traffic campaigner’.”
Strangely enough, Diddington has more in common with Piddington than a very similar name, as at one time, it too housed migrants, thousands of them. And once again, the Thornhill family was responsible for the influx.
In 1942, a 750-bed hospital was built on the Thornhill family’s land just outside the village to cater for injured American army personnel. During its time it ministered to over 4,000 patients.
After the war the site was requisitioned as a Polish Resettlement Camp and the hospital was turned into a maternity unit, where around 1,000 babies were born. Among those babies was actress Rula Lenska, who was born at the camp in 1947. The families were housed mainly in Nissen huts, and there was a school, a community centre, a cinema and a Catholic church.
The camp was certainly a busy place. Pretty much self-sufficient, it followed Polish customs and the Polish way of life. There was little integration with the locals, who remained suspicious of these foreigners living in the English countryside.
All the teachers and ancillary staff lived on the site, which had water and electricity, although conditions were rough and ready and certainly very basic.
Then gradually, from about 1955, the Nissen huts began to fall into disrepair, and the residents started to leave the camp. Many of them settled in nearby Huntingdon and villages round about rather than returning to Poland. There was much initial hostility to these incomers, but over time they became part of the populace and today, many of their descendants still live in the area.
Now, if you travel past Diddington on the A1, there is absolutely no sign that the camp ever existed and nothing to commemorate it, although there is a memorial in the village to honour the US Army’s Second Evacuation Hospital there.
Before long, the same area that once housed Polish refugees will be covered in solar panels, as is happening in many other parts of the country and causing ever more loss of farmland as a result. And Diddington, after decades of being virtually forgotten, is back in the news again, although hardly for the best of reasons.
Liz Hodgkinson is a British author and journalist. Her books include A Mink Coat in St Neots: My Mother’s Flower Shop and the Mystery of a Wealthy Russian Princess (Mount Orleans Press), The Fashionable Guide to Life, Ladies of the Grand Tour, and The English Country House.