In reply to Al Todd:
> Robert, I totally respect the views you're expressing on mountain huts, but since you've previously said you quite like wind farms and don't see they are doing any harm (springing up all over the Highlands), how do you square that with your comment that remoteness is worth preserving?
All I have said is that I've yet to see one that has visually bothered me, but that is far from saying there are no locations in which they would bother me - they are not "all over the highlands" and I don't think they are ever likely to be so. Anyway, conflating wind farms with huts is a non-argument; remoteness is not primarily about the visual impact of developments - it is about facilitation of access, and the only way wind farms might contribute to that is through the tracks built to them (also a bigger visual problem to me than the elegant turbines themselves). But I doubt many of us have used a wind farm track to significantly ease access to the hills (unlike estate tracks - a far bigger issue) since, as I said, the windfarms are not "all over the highlands" but largely confined to areas of lesser interest to walkers.
Edit: Of course in an ideal world we'd have no hill wind farms, hill tracks or mountain huts, but it is not an ideal world and just because it is hard to stop two of those things, it does not mean we should encourage the third.
Post edited at 00:21