An innovative Maraekakaho deer farmer is exercising his inherited rights over feudal commons land in England to make money out of "green" electricity.
Jeremy Dearden is the Lord of the Manor of Rochdale, which came with rights over commons land on the wind-blasted moors of Lancashire, 17km northeast of Manchester.
The Dearden
family bought the common land of Rochdale and the Lord of the Manor title from the poet Lord Byron shortly before his death in 1824 at the age of 36. Mr Dearden said his great-grandfather's cousin "cashed up everything that was saleable, and then, when he died, the title came to my great-grandfather".
In 2008, Mr Dearden asked the British Government to let him "de-register" three of the commons. He wants to provide land for electricity company Coronation Power to erect a dozen 125m tall wind turbines on the hilltops. A public inquiry is under way to determine whether that can be done.
"The place is full of little hamlets, which are a bit like lifestyle blocks over here, where no one wants this sort of thing in their backyard," Mr Dearden told Hawke's Bay Today.
Groups opposing the plan said the turbines could harm the rights of farmers. "The visual pollution aspect ... I can appreciate that," Mr Dearden said. "I have a pretty big view from my place here and I don't know that I'd like to see a lot of windmills. Yet progress is progress. The question is whether they'd like green wind power or a bigger carbon footprint."
Mr Dearden, whose descendants arrived in New Zealand in 1890, said England simply "wasn't my country anymore."
He said he had owned "quite a bit" of the commons around Rochdale - about 4000ha - since his father died in 1980: "It's been in the family a fair old while ... but it's sat there being pretty idle."
He said there was no Kiwi equivalent to commons land, which was governed by whoever held the rights, yet open to the public. "I've got the shooting rights, the grazing rights and the quarrying rights. But being commons, you can't fence it off."
The terrain was similar to the Desert Rd. "A few of the locals run a handful of scraggy sheep up there. It's high - for England - and cold, so it doesn't grow a lot of grass."
