In 1928, when Britain began to be wired up for electricity, the architect Clough Williams-Ellis noted: "We are promised a complete grid of high-tension power transmission lines that shall cover these islands as with a net.

We are also promised widespread industrial developments as a direct result, and of course proportionate prosperity.

"That will be very nice. But what is this magic network going to cost us, not in money but in amenity. What losses is this gain going to entail? All we know for certain is that they are going to be very heavy, inordinately heavier than they need be or have any right to be."

Judging by an early power line in his beloved North Wales, Williams-Ellis concluded: "Clearly the electrifiction of England will not be accomplished without severe shocks to amenity, unless we proceed better than we have begun."

But almost 75 years later we are still not proceeding any better. As a "shock to amenity" the new pylons that have suddenly sprung up along the Vales of York and Mowbray - culmination of the bitter, always-doomed ten year battle against them by locals - are stakes in the heart of this pleasant, if generally unexceptional countryside. And that's even before the thick black cables have been strung between the marching towers.

A protest placard near Northallerton rightly condemns this "rape of the countryside". But the word I would use is butchery. The National Grid has butchered hundreds of square miles of English landscape. And the damage doesn't stop there. Thirsk is now virtually ringed with pylons.

Years ago, protestors at the unsightliness of wires, poles and pylons had to balance their dismay against what John Betjeman - as fiercely anti-pylon as Williams-Ellis - admitted were the "inestimable benefits" of electricity. But now Britain has a 20 per cent over-capacity. The nuclear industry has just received a lifesaving £650m of taxpayers' cash. Coal-fired Drax, our biggest power station, is struggling to sell its electricity.

Today's market, however, is not only here but abroad. Centrica, the UK's largest energy supplier, is about to start supplying electricity to Spain. A vast expansion of electricity exports is expected when the European energy market is fully opened up in 2007. So rural England is being desecrated to light homes and power factories abroad.

Of course, by now, all high voltage power lines should be underground. The key phrase in that Williams-Ellis warning is that the environmental losses through overhead lines are heavier than they "have any right to be". He placed a value on the general countryside that is still unrecognised. Otherwise the vandalism of this latest power line would have been out of the question.

But a new element has entered the picture. Increasingly Britain's leaders jet off for their leisure. Partly the result of the mess that England has become, this trend will intensify with every fresh horror like the Vale of York pylons. As long as the view remains pristine from a villa in Tuscany or wherever, who gives a damn what the countryside looks like back home?

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/

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