An 82-acre solar farm has been proposed across working farmland in our parish, in the immediate setting of an iron age hillfort that has stood on our skyline for over two thousand years. We are standing up for five millennia of layered Herefordshire heritage, and the quiet country that holds it.
ILOS New Energy UK Limited (the UK subsidiary of the pan-European solar developer ILOS, headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, and majority-owned by AXA IM Alts) has signalled plans to lease around 82 acres of working farmland in our parish, roughly 33.32 hectares or 47 football pitches, and convert it into an industrial-scale solar generating station of up to 30 MW, operating for up to forty years.
We are not opposed to renewable energy. We are opposed to the wholesale industrialisation of an irreplaceable cultural landscape: one whose archaeological record stretches back roughly five thousand years, in a parish containing eleven nationally-designated heritage assets, on the immediate fringe of a National Landscape and in the catchment of an unfavourable-declining Special Area of Conservation.
Brownfield, rooftops, contaminated land, car parks. There are hundreds of better places for thirty megawatts. The fields below Dinedor Hill are not one of them.
Every public document ILOS has filed: the screening request, drawings, environmental correspondence, applicant statements, and the Council’s determination. Straight from the source.
The proposal sits in two parcels, with six designated heritage assets directly in its setting and at least six more designated assets nearby in Dinedor parish. The river Wye catchment and the iron age hillfort are both within walking distance. Tap any marker for the official record.
We can argue policy and planning law all day. But what’s really at stake is older, quieter, harder to put a figure against.
Long before the hillfort, the line of the Rotherwas Ribbon (a Neolithic ceremonial monument the County Archaeologist called “apparently so far unique in Europe”, of international significance) runs across the same agricultural corridor. To the west, on the hill, Dinedor Camp, an iron age scheduled monument that has held the skyline for over two thousand years. To the south and east, the heart of Dinedor village: a medieval village site, the 13th-century Church of St Andrew, the 18th-century Dinedor Court, and the Glebe Farmhouse complex. To the north, on the Rotherwas side of the parish, the earthwork remains of a 16th-century country house and a Tudor chapel. The proposal puts panels in the middle of all of it.
The site sits roughly 1.2 km from the Wye Valley National Landscape, on its immediate fringe, and four kilometres south-east of Hereford city centre. Eighty-two acres of glass and steel at the foot of an iron age hillfort would be felt from public footpaths, the river Wye, and the city itself. Once industrialised, this landscape doesn't come back in our lifetime.
Working arable ground, mature hedgerows, and a corridor that drains into the river Wye. The River Wye Special Area of Conservation is in unfavourable-declining condition; this is not the place to add another industrial pressure on top of it. Forty years of fencing, hardcore and panel-shadow is not a habitat. It's a sealed surface.
Dinedor is around 300 residents in 134 houses, clustered around the 13th-century Church of St Andrew. Construction means months of HGV traffic onto a 7.5-tonne weight-restricted B-road, perimeter security fencing across the field core, and a permanent change to the place where generations have lived, worshipped, and rest in the churchyard.
The Council has a clear planning framework for where industrial-scale development should happen in south Hereford. This proposal sits outside it.
For over a decade Herefordshire Council has had a clear planning answer to where industrial-scale development should happen in south Hereford: inside the Hereford Enterprise Zone. The Enterprise Zone covers approximately 110 acres at the core of the wider Rotherwas Industrial Estate, which itself extends to around 400 acres in total. Inside the Enterprise Zone, a Local Development Order grants a presumption of automatic planning approval for industrial development. The Council established that order in 2013, reviewed it in 2014, extended the Zone to the south and east in 2019, and renewed it again in 2025 to run until April 2030.
Inside the boundary: industrial development is encouraged. Outside it: working agricultural land. South of the Industrial Estate, that boundary has held for decades. Sink Green Farm, immediately south of the estate, has of sorts been a hard stop to industrial expansion beyond it. Beyond Sink Green is further countryside, Dinedor Hill, the Iron Age hillfort, and the line of the Rotherwas Ribbon.
The proposed solar farm would breach that boundary. It would place 82 acres of industrial-scale infrastructure outside the Enterprise Zone, in agricultural land the Council’s own planning framework has reserved for the countryside. This is not renewable development on industrial land. It is industrial development on the wrong side of the line. A precedent that, once set, would invite the next proposal, and the one after that, deeper into the parish.
We win this one with persistence and numbers. Here’s where to start.
The objection window opens the day ILOS lodges a planning application. We’ve drafted starter letters covering seven grounds: heritage, landscape, industrial development, ecology, highways, renewables policy, and the made Neighbourhood Development Plan. Pick the angle that matches your concern, copy the text, personalise it in your own words, and you’ll be ready on day one.
Your MP can press the Secretary of State on this case, raise solar-siting in Parliament, and write to Herefordshire Council on your behalf. We’ve drafted a template you can adapt. Personalised letters in your own words carry the most weight.
Wednesday 27 May 2026, 7:30pm at Dinedor Village Hall. Open meeting, all welcome: bring questions, bring neighbours, bring a friend.
Our argument isn’t a niche one. Communities across the UK are pushing back on industrial solar siting on agricultural land, and the policy literature largely agrees. A curated reading room of articles, position papers, and other campaigns we’ve found useful, plus photos of the Dinedor site as our members document it.
Short, considered updates from the DVAG committee. We’ll tell you what’s happening, what’s about to happen, and exactly what we’d like you to do. Nothing more.