PC: Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust
Woodhall Spa Airfield was constructed on former farmland as a satellite station to RAF Coningsby and opened in February 1942, according to Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust. The Trust states that, during the Second World War, the airfield was home to several RAF squadrons, including the famous 617 ‘Dambusters’ Squadron. The Trust’s 2014 news release also records a link to Guy Gibson, leader of the Dambusters raid. Gibson continued flying missions over Europe after the 1943 raid, until his last flight in 1944, according to the release. The Trust states that he took off from RAF Woodhall Spa on 19 September 1944 on a mission over Germany, and that his plane was lost whilst returning. In its news release of 19 September 2014, it announced that it had concluded the final phase of its purchase of the former RAF base. £450,000 was donated by WREN’s Biodiversity Action Fund Land Purchase Programme, and a further £100,000 came as a legacy donation from Robert Thomas Pearson, according to the release. The release notes that the purchase came exactly 70 years after the last flight of Guy Gibson. The 2014 release set out plans to restore parts of the land to the way it existed in the nineteenth century, including lowland heath, a habitat that already exists in the neighbouring Kirkby Moor nature reserve. It says a record of the landscape in 1890 survives in the diary of the Victorian naturalist Joseph Burtt Davy, who recorded the habitats and wildlife he met around Woodhall Spa.
The Trust says the airfield was, more recently, used as a sand and gravel quarry. The Trust also received substantial public donations. Woodhall Spa Airfield is a landscape of sandy soils with acid grassland, heathland with some marsh areas and open water. The reserve page includes a photograph of wildfowl flying above a lake in winter.
The Trust stated that the reserve would retain the outline of the airfield landing strip while restoring the landscape to its earlier condition.
