Sir – Irene Gill, responding to my letter about the thwarting of Oxford city’s schemes for monster wind turbines ringing the city, asked what our position was on electricity pylons. In fact we campaign constantly to have electricity cables “undergrounded”.

It is unfortunate that, seized with the excitement of the new National Grid in the 1920s, thought was not given to their eventual landscape impact, and cables buried from the start.

That said, the average pylon is only a quarter the height of an average turbine, and neither does it have moving blades 200 feet long.

It is also inescapable that wind turbines are bringing hundreds more miles of pylons in their train.

She is right that nuclear stations also damage the landscape, but much less of it. Whilst, for instance, Hinkley Point B covers 55 acres, it would require 2,200 turbines, covering 18,000 acres, to produce the same amount of electricity at Oxford wind speeds.

Would we have opposed windmills 200 years ago? It is a fair point.

Comparatively, though, a windmill is only an eighth of the height of a turbine, and at the time they were built windmills were the only available source of industrial power for large parts of the countryside.

The problem with wind turbines, especially in relatively windless places like Oxford, is that they provide the maximum amount of environmental damage for the minimum amount of output.

That situation is somewhat reversed at sea, which is where wind turbines should be sited.

Michael Tyce, Campaign to Protect Rural England (Thame), Waterstock