‘Are you sure airfields are archaeological sites?’ came the inevitable challenge from a member of the audience at a recent talk that I gave. It is a fair enough question, one that I have been asked many times over the last two decades. Here’s why I think they are.
If you took a flight above the United Kingdom, it would not take long to recognise one of the biggest types of landscape feature from the modern age. Airfields, especially those built during the Second World War, took in substantial tracts of land. Even if your feet are firmly on the ground, a cursory look at an Ordnance Survey map is likely to have at least one example of an ‘Airfield – Disused’ on it somewhere.
Such landscape features are almost totally driven by conflict, or the threat of it, displaying in concrete a society’s will to use the latest technology to protect a way of life, or press home a foreign policy through the projection of air-power. That might seem extreme today, although one has to remember powered flight is only just over 100 years old. Indeed, the world took just 66 years to go from the first powered flight (17 December 1903), by the Wright Brothers, to the Moon landing on 20 July 1969.
War Classics – 1066: the year of the conquest