Baldoon Airfield

Today's the day …………………… for an historic environment

We went to a Sawmills today, a couple of miles south of Wigtown - and while Will was busy, I had a look around.

It was rather an eerie place to be - partly because of the strange weather which was sometimes dark and threatening followed by spells of bright sunshine - but mainly because it was quite obvious that in times past, the land had been used for quite a different purpose.  And sure enough, when I did a bit of googling on my return, I found out a bit about its former life as RAF Wigtown.

It was a World War II airfield that opened in 1941 as a training school and operated in conjunction with a tracked target range near the coast to the southeast.  It was initially constructed with grass runways but flooding of the land soon caused these to become unusable, and so two concrete runways were installed during 1942.  Operations at the airfield came to an end in 1945 with the end of the war - and it finally closed on March 1, 1948.

However, the site was never cleared and many of the original buildings still survive despite the fact that the land has reverted to agricultural use.  This is the ghostly shell of the control tower still standing amongst the yellow oilseed rape ...............….