Upwood RAF Base

 

I collected my little green Nissan Micra on Friday afternoon and bombed it up to North Yorkshire to pull a few things out of storage and to just generally chill out and discover the Sam Smith’s pub in Whitby.

 

Photos from that day are in an earlier post and on the whole it was a very productive day… But anyway. Today saw me tootling down the A1 at comfortable speed and as I had been driving for a couple of hours I thought I’d make a slight detour to an easy but interesting enough site that I had heard about but not been to. RAF Upwood has a diverse a history as any RAF base you could choose and what’s left still holds plenty of attention for anyone looking for those interesting details.

 

Sheep now graze around the buildings that are still standing. Part of the site holds the local gliding club and few small businesses. The interesting part of the site now stands empty though there has been the addition of various palette bases in weird arrangement that now provide shelter to the reasonably regular airsoft games that are held on site.

 

I gingerly hauled myself over the gate with my tripod (I must get a bag or a strap for the thing) and wondered around the site in what was a very warm and glowing dusk. The shit inside the buildings showed that the more intrepid sheep had been through the place long before I had got there and the stacks of small white balls all over the floors among the broken glass told of great air-soft battles that hadn’t been brushed away.

 

I had a bit of an HDR fest. There were all sorts off odd tiled rooms that were open at one end and a hall that was big enough in floor plan to have been a gymnasium of some kind, but whose low ceiling probably meant that it was a canteen, provided some great pics and the start of a new series of portraits.

 

I didn’t have time to touch most of the buildings but considering that the site is about an hours drive from where I’m living it will b worth a return visit one nice evening for a better look around. As the light faded and I started to require exposures of a minute or more it was time to head back to the car and finish my journey home.

 

I left the sheep grazing in the field, starring at me and at a large group of youths (god, am I that old already?) who were finding their own entertainment by throwing large chunks of rubble at the walls of already wobbly looking buildings.