For the past few weeks I’ve been making a concerted effort to map solar panels across rural areas of North & Central Wales (Powys, Gwynedd and Ynys Mon - Anglesey), so far with good results. I’m using a thorough search technique which looks at individual clusters of buildings from Ordnance Survey Open Data (which is complete for Great Britain). This means I see lots of other things which need mapping, but from experience I know it’s important to focus on the specific task. However, I have followed up some of the more striking things, which I plan to report in a series of posts.

First up was a striking structure in the middle of farmland on the Llyn Peninsula. It was pretty obviously a high-tech milking machine: milking parlour seems a bit quaint for a pretty sophisticated bit of kit.

Bing Imagery (close-up view).

Bing Imagery (context).

Fortunately there are some good Geograph images which confirmed my intrepretation, and provided other information too.

The Cefnamwlch Home Farm Milking Parlour

One of these says the dairy has over 1000 cows, so the machinery is probably working pretty much all the time. When seen in context it is apparent that there are wide trackways converging on the parlour allowing continuous streams of cattle to flow and from the site.

Entry to the Milking Parlour

Super-sized dairy farms are still relatively uncommon in the UK, and most probably keep the cattle under cover all the time (as in the US), so this one with the milking machinery open to the air is even more unusual. Subsequently, I’ve found one other on Anglesey at Bryncelli Ddu outside Llanddaniel Fab.

In both the footprint of the farmyard area is substantial, but most distinctive is the engineered network of trackways (sometimes including underpasses or overpasses to avoid minor roads) which also occur on farms with indoor milking parlours, such as Plas Llanfihangel (also on Anglesey). Given the continuous to and fro of cattle, and the associated muck, I presume these are solely dedicated for their passage.

I’m not sure that there are any useful mapping points to be learnt here, as most milking parlours are just non-descript large farm sheds, and tracks are tracks. However, there are other distinctive farm buildings which are associated with other intensive husbandry practices which I’ll look at soon.