It is almost exactly 10 years ago that my wonderful builder and I started work on the derelict shepherd’s house high up a single track road over a Scottish moor that is now my home.

This is longer than I have lived anywhere else in my adult life, so it seems like a good moment for reflection, for a progress report on the life of a “rural solitary” – a term I have come to prefer to “hermit”, which feels rather exaggerated and which raises odd expectations in others as well as in myself.

Over 10 years things have changed. The biggest external change has been the wind farms, and I have not become reconciled to them. When I first came here, one of the things I most loved was the emptiness of the landscape, the huge long rise and fall of the moor, the dance of the grasses in the wind, the absence of sharp “features”. It seemed not only very beautiful but also very appropriate to my imagined life of silence.

But now I can see more than 20 turbines from my garden. Turbines are sharp-edged and break the flow of the hill line. And there are so many more coming. This summer I am living more or less on a construction site; they have cut hard, gritted tracks into the green hillsides; each week a new mast appears, nearer and nearer to my house.