Heard from another native, who mentioned a collision between a Wellington and a Spitfire or Hurricane. One of them came down at Mosstodloch.

Anybody know anything?

I must be boring the natives to distraction with my questions. It’s costing me beer.

Rothes Ju188

Found some information about Ju 188 F-1, Werke Nr 280608, A6+HH on

http://www.rafandluftwaffe.info/lists/luftwaffe2.html

and

http://www.luftwaffe.no/SIG/Losses/tap43.html.

It is located 5km NW of Rothes. I’ll ask someone I know who remembers seeing wreckage when he was doing Forestry work on the hills. Hopefully the site isn’t lost under the tree planting and is on the open moorland.

Someone has been making glyphs with the tree planting up there too. Google Earth shows a horse, a spiral and a triangle up there now!

A bit out of date, but some years back I was pootling about at cloudbase in a Ka 8 glider, somewhere south of Forres, when I saw a Dragon Rapide go past from west to east, slightly below and very close. I didn’t say anything to anyone at the time, nor did I mention it in my log book because I wasn’t sure it was for real! I thought people would just take the p*ss, as if I’d said I’d seen a UFO.

A few days later I read in the local paper that it had been commemorating an Inverness airport anniversary. My mind was put at ease although I was kind of disappointed that it wasn’t a ghostly experience…

I think the turret is gone now. It was next to a car park in the woods, beside an old abandoned vehicle according to the person who told me about it.

Rothes Lancaster engine bearers

Hello – new here. Hello too to Al.

I have a copy of a local (Rothes) lads diary entries from the 1940s. He wrote of a plane crash at Drumbain, A mile or so west of Rothes on 14th Feb 1942. It struck trees in the belt of woods at Ardcanny before it came down in the Drumbain Burn at the bottom of a ravine. Other locals tell me it was a Wellington and there was one survivor, found by a shepherd, from a crew of 5 -an air gunner who was later killed. It seems a team from Dundee arrived and was billeted here to remove the wreckage. Quite likely as Williamsons, the local Elgin scrap merchant mentioned a big scrapyard in Dundee too.

I’m told that quite a lot was buried near the site due to the terrain. Locals have offered to show me exactly where they used to collect bullets and bits of burnt alloy as kids.

Tony Carlin, the station historian at RAF Lossie tells me that Wellington 1C N2825 from 20 OTU crashed ‘into a hill near Rothes’ on the date above. At that time 20 OTU was based at Lossie.

Other research shows that Sgt. Henry Clark (1015524) age 27 Obs. 20 OTU was lost in Wellington N2825 in an accident 14/2/42.

Fairly conclusive?

As for the Lancaster engine bearers, the nearest Lancaster crash I know of was at Mulben, just a few miles East North East of Rothes. The date was also in the diary I had, but I’ve mislaid it. Locals can remember playing in a turret there some years ago.

I spoke to the farmer at Drumbain and he tells me his father bought some aircraft scrap for fabricating things on the farm, so maybe Al wasn’t so far off when he joked about a combine harvester firewall. Perhaps the bearers were left over from the farmers purchase.