A walk in the shadow of Chernobyl

I spent one of the last hours of 2015 walking in Whitelee Forest, on the Eaglesham Moor. I visit those forest tracks every now and again and they have already featured once in this blog. For the benefit of non-weegies, the Eaglesham Moor is a large area of high, rough moorland just south of Glasgow. After festive indulgence and indolence some cold breeze, rough ground and maybe a wee rain shower or two were called for.

Things are changing out there. Whitelee Windfarm continues to expand; or maybe other wind power developments are springing up on its edges. Anyway the road has been resurfaced, there is new fencing, access roads across what used to be solely farmland, fire rendezvous points. The picture at left looks down the road to the Myres Hill turbine test site, which was there before the big windfarm. It shows the rough, informal parking arrangements as they were in 2009 but improvements to road and fencing have left less space for cars. I first discovered these places just by following my nose on a bike run sometime around 1990. On nice days they're very popular with people looking for wee strolls somewhere close to the south edge of the city so it seems a shame that parking has been made harder.

Whitelee has civilised the wild, boggy, unfrequented Eaglesham Moor I first started to discover in the 1990s. I'm all for wind power, however, and you can still find boggy, unfrequented corners if you work at it a little. Walking about after dark helps!

I followed the sign across the field behind Carrot Farm and climbed up the track towards the Munzie Burn, aiming for a circular walk (made possible by a track established in the forest only in the last few years - something else that has changed). Eventually I came to an area where trees are being felled, shown at left. The light had faded a lot by then, hence the poor picture. Signs forbade me to proceed unless authorised. I'm seldom "authorised". Fortunately I didn't need to proceed and could turn right at this crossroads but I started to think about the fact of the felling.

Some years ago I was told about the origin of Whitelee Forest (where and by whom is a story, too. I'll save that for another time unless people tell me what follows is wrong). The rough, upland Eaglesham Moor used to be devoted to sheep farming. That ended after the explosive events of 26 April, 1986 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine. In the days that followed, radioactive fallout was deposited over most of Western Europe. ¹³⁷Cs (caesium-137) is a radioactive isotope of caesium that doesn't occur in nature, but was one of the most important sorts of waste carried across the continent following Chernobyl. Like all the best isotopes it has its own Wikipedia page. It accumulates in the bodies of animals that eat it. It has a half-life of 30 years, i.e. a fixed amount of it is half as radioactive after 30 years. So we have to be wary of eating animals that have been gobbling ¹³⁷Cs and it was almost 25 years before many upland farmers in the UK were allowed to sell the meat from their animals. Farmers can't survive indefinitely when they can't sell their animals and big bits of the Eaglesham Moor wound up sold for forestry.

Bits of Whitelee Forest have been getting cleared for a year or two now but coming across this area of felling, in the half-dark, got me thinking about this more than previously. I thought I remembered that a forest of conifers comes to maturity in about 30 years. I was wrong; it's more like 70 but selective felling might start from 20-25 years; just the right timing after all. The shadow of Chernobyl still hangs over Whitelee.

Chernobyl was a destructive incident whose wide-ranging consequences highlight the possible negative side of nuclear energy. There is no doubt that it has had an enduring effect on perceptions of nuclear energy, and must be one of the factors impeding its acceptance as part of a low-carbon future - just look at this article con, or this one pro. The phrase "low carbon" of course brings us back to Whitelee, second biggest windfarm in Europe.

Many of us head out onto various corners of the Eaglesham Moor to get away from complex, modern lives; to spend an hour or two away from machines and crowds. How strange to realise that the management of these places has for decades now been determined by aspects of one of the big technology debates of our time: how to keep heating and lighting and heating our homes, and powering our factories, without simultaneously driving catastrophic climate change. And how weird, particularly, to recall that the Whitelee Forest's existence and development stems from the few hours of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, 2300 km away, in 1986.

This won't stop me from enjoying the Moor and the Forest. If anything these realisations will add a certain piquancy and the quiet of the forest will be just the place to mull over these stories and their meaning.