Geograph - photograph every grid square

A former WW2 RAF operational training unit base, notable for being the starting point for the raid on the German battleship Scharnhorst and for being Winston Churchill’s departure point for the Casablanca conference. This Bomber Command airfield opened in September 1940 as a satellite to RAF Abingdon and was used by aircraft such as Wellingtons and Whitley Bombers. The aerodrome took part in the “Thousand Bomber Raid” of mid-1942. In 1943 it was used by Airspeed Oxfords belonging to No. 1 Blind Approach Training School. The layout incorporated a main runway aligned north-east to south-west, with subsidiary runways in triangular formation. The buildings included a guardroom and motor transport section; the turret trainer and crew room are amongst those which remain. It closed shortly after the war and is now mostly a gravel pit, although a Neolithic henge monument, the Devil’s Quoits, partly destroyed by runway construction, has recently been reconstructed on the site.