The RSPB reserve, cycling distance from my home is great. I guarantee there is nowhere else that you can watch F15s on base leg and hear a Bittern at the same time.
Moggy

My girlfriend’s mother is a retired ecologist and one of the places she used to record regularly was a nature reserve just outside the fence at the end of Upper Heyford’s runway. She said you got used to F111s on final approach coming over your head with everything hanging out fairly quickly, but the day all the alarms went off, every vehicle with a blue light on it on the base came roaring out of its hole up to the runway and an F111 came in trailing flame and a greasy black smoke trail was interesting. It wasn’t so much the ecological damage she was worried by as the fact that it was going to do ecological damage to her if it didn’t make the tarmac!

Adrian

Given that there’s a Tiger Moff at Andrewsfield, Pete…

Or you could investigate Earl’s Colne’s bomb dump out in the woods? See whether the Ridgewell sites near the A604 (? – long time since I used it, and I’m fairly sure it’s changed numbers since!) are still there? Investigate Gt Sampford? There used to be rolls of Sommerfeld tracking down a concrete track off one end of Ridgewell, yonks ago now…

Do they help?

Adrian

The only address that came with it was Adrian Gray’s but I think you had it recently. Allan

Nope, haven’t had it in an age. If the address you have starts with 13, PM me for my new one before you send – or it’ll lurk for ages on an unfriendly doormat!

Adrian

Certainly a possibility – IIRC Hawkinge *spits* have a pair of Spitfire wings that turned up at Woolwich Arsenal, and another famous wing find is lurking tantalisingly on the edge of memory but just won’t rise to the top.

Quite recently some small Overstrand wing parts turned up in a shed near Bicester – aha, didn’t a set of Bulldog wings turn up at Bicester? Maybe that’s it?

And allegedly at Runwell in Essex a Gotha wing was used as a fence into the 1960s, before it conveniently rotted away just as everyone was getting interested in such things…

Adrian

Bloody stunning, the lot of them! My personal highlight – call me an old sap, but – has to be the silhouettes.

And you can really see why that colour scheme used to known as dried sewage…

Adrian

On an entirely random tangent, I’ve seen a morris group (dancing, not cars) perform a dance called “Blue Steel Rocket” at the Thaxted festival. It involves much throwing of sticks high in the air and attempting to catch them – as the announcer said “If we’d known there was all that throwing sticks, we’d have scheduled you before it got dark”.

By the way, to whoever made the comment about where Australia puts its illegal immigrants – watch your back, sonny, their biggest problem is with illegal immigrants from Great Britain!

Adrian

Oh God, I’ve just got the pun! 😮

Mark 12, that’s terrible!

Adrian the slow today