I think I’ve seen a Spitfire leaving Kidlington this morning.  Frustratingly, I never got a view of the planform and planes leaving from our end are a long way away before we can see them so it was pretty small by then. 

SPAMMER ALERT!

I wouldn’t touch that link with a bargepole. 

If you can’t imagine it today,  you haven’t been to East Kirkby’s fireworks – they are apocalyptic! Plus gobsmacking good value,  for the price of just the whizzbangs anywhere else, if you are lucky, you get to see NX611 running at night, plus all the other attractions and aircraft. 

Sorry, digression over!

“Common sense dictates that the aerodrome must have been extended, probably considerably.”

Absolutely agree, but the post-WW2 airfield was long and narrow (in the pic wyvernfan attached, you can see the cropmarks from the later perimeter track), I’d expect the original field to be roughly square or maybe circular in shape.

Best WW1 photo I’ve found is on this page: https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/american-airmen-duxford-and-the-first-wo… – suggests squareness, but no clue as to how far South the field extends.

This is what it looked like in 1946: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duxford_Aerodrome#/media/File:Duxford-9ju…

I’m going to stick my neck out and say, based solely on the fact that the Western boundary near the road is largely the same as the WW2 one barring the dispersals, that I think the WW2 field probably respects the WW1 boundaries, the later perimeter track is well inside the WW2 one on that side. I’m looking forward to being smug if proved right and being educated if proved wrong, because I’m sure there are more photos out there!

If that’s the case, Mason wasn’t far off the airfield at all (he says, trying to get back on track).

Good question – I suspect the WW1 airfield was squarer, possibly even within the current dimensions.

That’s a pity, I wondered if that might be the case because there were a lot of Riches in Littleport in 1911. Emily Miller might just scrape into the census as a newborn – worth checking for her?

OK, got my teeth into this now, much easier when not on a phone in a car as I was yesterday, and tired, wet and cold.

Yes, it’s Grange Road. Annoyingly, the scale of these maps is large enough that it’s covered by no less than three sheets, but the reporting is actually bang-on, each farm has a shelter belt of trees round it, it describes them perfectly. Apart from the airfield and M11, the scene today is close enough that I think we can be confident that the 1903 map is a good representation of the ground in 1924.

https://maps.nls.uk/geo/find/#zoom=13.7&lat=52.08872&lon=0.11795&layers… – the road we are interested in is the one crossing the bottom right of the map.

If anyone has FindMyPast, they should be able to find young Elsie on the 1921 census (I’ve tried looking for her parents in 1911 on Ancestry, and failed) – hopefully they’re in one of the farms along the road. My money is on College Farm which DX-ites will know as where the “potato boxes” that are really full of Spitfires from Burma are always stacked up on the far side.