THE Forestry Commission may be acting illegally in allowing wind farms to be built on its land.

The claim, in an independent report on the visual impact of the UK’s largest proposed inland wind farm near Huntly, Aberdeenshire, could, if successfully challenged, pose serious problems for existing and future wind-farm development on commission-owned land.

The Forestry Cmmission already has one wind farm, in Scotland at Deucheran Hill and another with planning approval at An Suidhe, both in Argyll. Others are understood to be under consideration.

Now the developer, AMEC, wants to build a 47-turbine wind farm - each windmill more than 300 feet high - over a six by 1.5-mile site on the skyline of the commission’s Clashindarroch Forest, 200 yards above the River Deveron to the south-west of Huntly and on the tourism "whisky trail".

The proposal will require the felling of almost two square miles of immature trees and the creation of an access road through a Scottish Natural Heritage site of special scientific interest. SNH, controlled by the Scottish Executive with a 18 per cent renewable energy target by 2010, has not objected.

But in a criticism of AMEC’s environmental study, Geoffrey Sinclair, of Environmental Information Services (EIS), says that after examining the Forestry Commission remit and government guidelines, it can find nothing which allows commission land to be used for anything other than forestry.

EIS says that in spite of a commission claim that its powers can be interpreted as including wind-farm development, those powers are nonetheless subject to "an over-riding requirement to observe forestry purposes".

"Accordingly there must remain some doubt as to whether the commission’s action in seeking to allow AMEC to construct such an installation is strictly lawful.

"The scale and immense linear extent of the turbines on a conspicuous ridgeline is far in excess of anything yet consented in the region, or constructed in the UK."

The EIS report was commissioned by the River Deveron Fisheries Board, a government body. The board fears "run-off" from hillside excavation for concrete turbine bases in peat, plus access road construction, will silt up and destroy trout and salmon spawning habitat in the same way commission planting and lack of controlled drainage destroyed habitat in the Bogie, a tributary to the Deveron, 30 years ago.

The EIS‘s view was presented to Aberdeenshire councillors at a public meeting in Huntly, attended by 70 people, at which many speakers complained that the AMEC environmental study was flawed. A report of the meeting will be sent to the Scottish Executive.

One local resident, Peter Nelson, an offshore oil engineer, said the AMEC study was "grossly simple" compared with the study demanded for onshore development associated with the Corrib oilfield in the west of Ireland, with which he had been involved.

"I am appalled," he said. "Nowhere in the [AMEC study] do they consider the construction phase, the environmental effect of having to bring in huge bits of equipment. It is simply not mentioned. That is a disgrace."

The competence of AMEC’s study was further questioned by Jolyon Robinson, the owner of Beldorney Castle, a schedule-A historic monument restored with the aid of taxpayers’ money.

The castle had been omitted from the AMEC report although other historic buildings up to 20 miles away, unaffected by the development, had been included. Historic Scotland is to prepare a separate report on the wind-farm’s effect on the setting of an ancient monument.