Few people south of the border are aware of the tragedy unfolding in Scotland, where there are proposals for 200 wind farms, from Sutherland and the Isle of Lewis down to the Borders. These include no fewer than 6,622 turbines, many 400 feet high, covering more than 1,000 square miles. If all these are built, according to the Scottish Wind Assessment Project, which has just published a map of these sites, there will be scarcely "a single view in Scotland where you cannot see one of these windmills''.

Last week I spoke to Olive Repton, a 74-year-old farmer in Dumfriesshire, one of thousands of campaigners against this devastation as a public inquiry opened into a proposal for 71 turbines to dominate the hills where she has farmed for decades. Another inquiry opens shortly into a proposal for 161 more in the nearby Upper Clyde valley.

Few of these schemes will be turned down because the Scottish Executive is so infatuated by the fantasy of wind power that - by 2020 - it dreams of generating 40 per cent of Scotland's energy from renewable sources, double its EU target. What makes this so alarming is that wind turbines are so inefficient and expensive that, economically, they make no sense at all (without the hidden 100 per cent subsidy paid by all of us through our electricity bills, it would not pay anyone to build them).

As for their supposed environmental benefits, these are absurdly overstated in terms of "combating'' global warming. Forty years ago we pointlessly sacrificed the skylines of our cities to building tower blocks of council flats. When this mad obsession with turbines comes to be seen as a similar fantasy, who will then restore the wild beauty of those Scottish hills?