Stand on the ridge above St Mary Bourne on a clear morning and you understand immediately why this corner of Hampshire was given national protection.
Chalk downland rolling away in every direction. Hedgerows older than the villages they border. Hardly a single jarring intrusion to break the line of the horizon.
This is the England the North Wessex Downs designation exists to preserve.
It will not look like that for much longer.
Last week, an inspector allowed an appeal for a huge solar farm at Lower Wyke.
Not a modest array tucked behind a hedge.
Thirty-five hectares of farmland, given over for up to 40 years to panels, fencing, CCTV and the full paraphernalia of industrial energy generation, inside a landscape Parliament itself decided was worth protecting.
The inspector did not pretend this was harmless.
He accepted that the scheme would harm the landscape and visual amenity of the area.
He accepted that it would introduce a large amount of modern energy infrastructure into a largely undeveloped rural setting.
He accepted, in terms, that it would appear incongruous and industrial in the countryside.
He accepted all of that. And he approved it anyway.
Forty years is the figure officials reach for when they want a permission to sound temporary. It is not temporary.
A child born in St Mary Bourne this year will be entering middle age before that fencing comes down.
William Cobbett rode this same chalk country two centuries ago and judged it among the finest land in the kingdom. Not for much longer.
Nor does this decision stand alone.
An inspector allowed a separate appeal for a station car park development at Whitchurch, in the same protected landscape, only recently.
Different site, different scheme, same pattern.
How much can a so-called protected landscape absorb, piece by piece, before the word protected stops meaning anything at all?
Nobody disputes the need for clean energy. But there is a right place for solar power, and Lower Wyke is not it.
Rooftops. Warehouses. Car parks - even the A303 embankments. Brownfield sites already scarred by development.
Put panels there and nobody need lose a single hectare of farmland or a single inch of view across the Downs.
Put them on protected farmland instead, and we have simply decided that the protection is negotiable whenever an applicant is patient enough to appeal.
That is the real damage here, deeper than 35 hectares of solar panels.
Residents in this part of Hampshire were told their landscape was special and safeguarded.
They organised, objected, made their case through the proper channels, and lost anyway, to a process that accepted every one of their arguments and then ignored them.
Local democracy is not a consultation exercise that ends in the result the planners wanted all along.
I will keep making that case, for St Mary Bourne and for every village in this National Landscape now bracing for the next application.
Protect a landscape in name only for long enough, and one day there is no landscape left to protect.
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