`The oak trees: they stretch for miles and miles along the gently undulating country. They are not very high, and magnificence is not theirs, but they look immensely sturdy and their trunks are gnarled and twisted so that they give you an impression of violent effort. And for miles, as far as the eye can see, you have the monotonous lines of furrows.'
Thus, writing in 1933, did William Somerset Maugham describe La Mancha. Al Mansha is Arabic for "dry land" or "wilderness", and was the Moorish name given to the vast arid plain to the south of Madrid, between the Sierra Morena and the mountains of Toledo.
The region's most renowned inhabitant was El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, whom we know and love as El Caballero de la Triste Figura, the Knight of the Doleful Countenance, Don Quixote. He was, if you remember, a man of gentle and amiable disposition, devoted to the ancient ways of chivalry, who roamed his native plain to seek adventure, and found it now and then by tilting at a windmill.
People are still tilting at windmills. The wind is free, a potential source of energy constantly renewed by radiation from the sun, and its exploitation has none of the unpleasant side-effects commonly associated with the extraction of energy from fossil fuels.
Yet, in Ireland at any rate, wind power on a large scale has never quite caught on, and the amount of our energy obtained from the wind is still infinitesimal compared with that from other sources.
It does, of course, have disadvantages. Wind energy is highly dispersed and diluted; it takes several hundreds - or even thousands - of windmills to extract the same amount of energy from the wind as that produced by a single traditional power station.
Those who are unenthusiastic about wind power maintain that this multiplicity of units, combined with their high individual cost, results in production costs for electricity which are many times that of more conventional methods.
And then the machines are big, as much as 300 ft high, and they must be well spaced out so that one turbine does not interfere with the wind blowing on to another. So a wind farm of several hundred machines must occupy a substantial area. And unfortunately the most suitable locations, as regards the availability of wind, are often those in the most scenic parts of any region.
For contemporary Don Quixotes, as an American playwright once described it: "What you get for free will sometimes cost too much."