Marwell airfield

For work-related reasons, I get to spend time at Marwell Zoo once or twice a year, and this has happened for quite a few years. But it wasn't until quite recently that I became aware that the area around Marwell used to harbour a secret airfield in WWII ...

To make the airfield less recognisable as such, it had removable hedges! Surfing the web, I managed to find a contemporary aerial photo which shows where the runways were.

This is a current Google Earth image of the same area ...

... so, obviously, I tried to overlay the WWII runways as best as I could on that satellite image:

And we the set out to see what is still visible of that secret airfield today ... We started at the one remaining structure from those days: a 'Robin' hangar along Thomson's Lane.

The hangar, still called 'The Aircraft Hangar', is used by CNC Polystyrene.

Looking in roughly southeasterly direction from the Hangar, as indicated by the red arrow here, ...

... and all you see is fields:

We then drove in counterclockwise direction to Portsmouth Road, looking roughly northeast, from where the end of one of the two runways used to be (again, as indicated by the red arrow):

Fields again, but you can just spot the gap in the tree line where the two runways used to cross each other:

Further counterclockwise, along Hurst Lane, and looking southwest (as indicated by the red arrow), along where the other, longer runway used to be:

No sign of anything airfield-related!

Bit further along Hurst Lane, looking southwest along where the shorter runway used to be (as per the red arrow) ...

... and just a field!

So, it appears that, apart from the 'Robin Hangar', essentially nothing is left to show that there was a secret airfield here in WWII. Maybe no surprise, given that the airfield was meant to be secret ...

But did you notice the wind vane in the picture of the hangar above? If not, here it is in close-up:

Spitfire!

I expect this is a more recent addition to the hangar (rather than it dating to the 1940s), but it's certainly a nice nod to the history of the site.