An innovative Hawke's Bay farmer is exercising his inherited rights over feudal commons land in England to make money out of "green" electricity.
Jeremy Dearden, who lives near Hastings, holds a title, Lord of the Manor of Rochdale, which came with rights over commons land on the wind-blasted moors of Lancashire, about 17km northeast of Manchester and on an ancient route to Yorkshire at the foot of the South Penines ranges.
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 stripped the estate of anything which could be sold: "He 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 allow him to "deregister" some of the commons.
He wants to provide land for a big electricity company, Coronation Power, to erect a dozen 125m tall wind turbines on the hilltops.
A public inquiry is under way to determine whether three commons at Crook Hill and one at Inchfield Moor can be de-registered to enable the building of the turbines, the Manchester Evening News reported on its website.
The company plans to build eight turbines at Crook Hill with an option to build another four on Inchfield.
The de-registration application had been made by the Lord of the Manor of Rochdale, Jeremy Dearden, who lives in New Zealand, the newspaper reported. It had been opposed by a number of groups who claimed the turbines could harm the rights of hill farmers.
But Mr Dearden told NZPA said that he had owned "quite a bit" of the commons around Rochdale - about 4000 hectares - since his father died in 1980: "It's been in the family a fair old while ... but it's sat there being pretty idle."
"I've got the shooting rights, the grazing rights and the quarrying rights -- and you get the odd cellphone tower on there. But being commons, you can't fence it off."
The country was too tough for intensive lamb production and the terrain was similar to the Desert Road across the central North Island.
"A few of the locals run a handful of scraggy sheep up there," he said. "It's high - for England - and cold, so it doesn't grow a lot of grass."
Environmental constraints had stopped him opening a new quarry, because the little hamlets had become quite trendy and nobody wanted trucks rumbling through their streets.
There had also been a "nimby" reaction to the wind turbines, Mr Dearden said.
"The visual pollution aspect of it .. I can appreciate that," he told NZPA. "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."
