The field was the airbase (or a bit of)? I'd like to be there to have a look and imagine it.
Love the church however, sep the old oak beam over the screen.
Lovely, and evocative.
I'm moved to dig-out my copy of 'Tewlve o'clock High' and watch it again soon...
Thanks all, I've really enjoyed these comments, because they reflect my own feelings about these old wartime airfields. Many of them have long gone to soulless housing or industrial estates, but quite a few have just quietly melted back into the landscape from which they were so hurriedly, and impressively, honed in 1942/43, leaving distinctive and sometimes quite ghostly traces. Willingale, as it is known locally, is certainly one of the latter, despite its former vast size hidden discreetly away on farmland that is typically both remote and nearby, on slightly raised ground. It also still has traces of the very long pre-war incarnation. The track from Operations up onto the peritracks and thence to the dispersals follows not a dead-straight military form, but the winding course of an ancient lane, and the traces of other former lanes, and long demolished residences, can still be found. The bedding for the vast runways, now long gone, comprised the rubble of bombed East End houses, and in the wood (visible in the first photo) that sits upon the site where it was dumped by convoys of trucks coming up from London, one can still find vestiges of people's lives - fireplace tiles, bakerlite switches, broken decorative details.
Innocuous, but haunted. And so hard to photograph, hence the slightly OTT gratitude.
12 o'clock High, what a great film. The post opening scenes, where one of the key players revisits the crumbling remains of his old airfield, encapsulates perfectly the atmosphere, sometimes still tenuously there even now, of these places. An informative study in human psychology too. I think it's been used to train military and business students.
