A favourite poet of mine is Ursula Fanthorpe. Born in 1929 she taught at Cheltenham Ladies College for 16 years before, as she put it, "deciding to do something different.'' That included working as a telephone clerk for Hoover and as a hospital receptionist.

Among her wonderful, unmistakable poems is one that celebrates a feature of her native Kent - Romney Marsh. Or rather, it laments the marsh. Written in 1996 it anticipated this atmospheric landscape's sacrifice to a planned new major road.

It is a kingdom, a continent,

Nowhere is like it.

(Ripe for development.)

It is salt, solitude, strangeness.

It is ditches, and windcurled sheep.

It is sky over sky after sky.

(It wants hard shoulders, Happy Eaters,

Heavy breathing of HGVs.)

There's more, in which Ursula contrasts other defining elements of the marsh - lonely churches, stubborn little trees - with what lies in store: "Kwiksaves, Ind Est, Jnctns, Sgns syng T'DEN, F'STONE, C'BURY.'' The poem concludes:

It is itself, and different.

(Nt fr lng. Nt fr lng.)

Whether the road got built or not I don't know. But Ursula couldn't have envisaged the complete destruction of the marsh's special atmosphere that is now on hand. Were she writing the poem today, her list of horrors would have to be headed by wind farms.

The Government has just approved the construction of 26 360ft tall turbines which will cover 1,000 acres of the marsh and dominate the whole of it. They will require six and half miles of new roads.

Never mind that the county councils of Kent and Sussex, and the two district and 12 parish councils that cover the area opposed the turbines. Never mind that they were supported by the RSPB and English Nature.

The Government sidestepped the usual planning arrangements to place the final decision with the Department of Trade and Industry. And they chose to announce their act of vandalism, not to the community, but to a conference of the British Wind Energy Association, where the news was no doubt greeted with appreciative applause.

Sod the (shrinking) countryside of our small island. Nowhere is this more precious than in the hard-pressed south east, where Romney Marsh is one of very few areas with a sense of remoteness. Isolated amid dykes, its Fairfield Church is one of the most memorable I have visited.

But it is the entire British countryside, outside the national parks, that faces destruction through the Government's shocking philistinism. Wind farms are the stake in the countryside's heart on top of the thousand cuts imposed by the roads and sprawl so vividly characterised in Ursula Fanthorpe's poem.

In a recent lecture, Max Hastings, president of the Council for the Protection of Rural England, observed that bulldozers were the Government's "apparent weapons of choice for imposing a cruel stamp upon rural England''.

As he pointed out, the most vital fact of our countryside is that no more of it is being created. When it's gone, it's gone. Perhaps because our leader spends so little time in it, and certainly wouldn't dream of recharging his batteries by exploring Romney Marsh, our Government doesn't even recognise the folly of its barbarous actions.