Pylons first appeared in this country during the construction of the National Grid in the late twenties and early thirties, but those used for the 132,000-volt network at the time were much smaller than the kind we have now. I expect they were like the ones Spender describes in the other piece of poetry I know; we had to learn it at school:

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete That trails black wire; Pylons, those pillars Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret.

Our modern pylons don’t look like naked girls, I doubt if any ever did really. They look like insects, not just any insects but the cicada or cricket type.

“An insect has six legs,” Daniel said, “and so does a pylon. It’s a grasshopper hopping across the fields.”

Strictly speaking, pylons have six arms with dangling insulators on the ends of them for carrying the conductors and they stand upright as if about to take huge leaps. The hanging insulators resemble the creature’s claws and the pylon’s small head is insectlike too. Ugly to some but not to me. I loved pylons. I loved them more than trees or church steeples or any other tall things, loved the strength of them, the power of them, and the danger.

The foundations of a pylon can extend ten feet underground, and though they’re made of concrete, the pylons themselves are of steel, a latticework of steel bars, widely spaced at the foot and tapering to a point, the shape of the Eiffel Tower, and the big ones that carry 400,000 volts are more than 150 feet high. The line of them that marches across the field next to our house was put up in the late fifties to carry the power from the nuclear power station at Sizewell on the east coast—just visible, as I later discovered for myself, from the Silvermans’ country house—into Essex and Hertfordshire. These are the big ones, bearing the maximum voltage. The National Grid paid the owner of the field quite a lot of money to put up the pylons and the story goes that he used it to leave his wife and set up house with a man he had been in love with for years.