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RAF Spadeadam Biodiversity Day

I had a great day a couple of weeks ago visiting RAF Spadeadam. This base is located about 5 miles north of our Bed and Breakfast in Gilsland. It has no landing strip, so aircraft movements are fairly minimal around here! The day was organised by CREA (Cumbria Rural Enterprise Agency). This is the organisation that has awarded us the Silver Environmental Award for the Tantallon House Bed and Breakfast. Basically the day was to involve other local business in environmental issues, to view the estate, to get ideas for documentation and to see how other businesses help nature and allow the biodiversity of the base to develop.

Older people will recall the “Blue Streak” rocket programme in the 1950’s and 1960’s. What they did was to test the rocket engines at RAF Spadeadam and great concrete structures were built to allow this. This testing involved huge amounts of water, so this was collected in spillways and settling tanks during the testing.

I checked if we were allowed to take photos and we are OK for the wild life and the old structures. There is a good web site for RAF Spadeadam and lots of information is around for the Blue Streak Programme.

What did we see? Well, this list is a bit of a flavour of the day:-

• Beautiful blue wild orchids
• The insect eating plant hogwort
• The settling tanks with trout
• Hundreds of dragonflies in the settling tanks.
• The ponds which have glebe in (but this was the wrong time of year to see them)
• The old mock landing strips where the ditches were filled in with heather bales
• The old concrete structures where owls nest.
• The base has all the British birds of prey i.e. buzzard, kestrel, etc but we didn’t see any unfortunately.
• All the lovely wild flowers.
• Wild cranberries (the berries develop later in the year).
• All the birds flying around the tanks collecting insects.
• The “moving mire” bogs.

Much of the area at the base is just left and as there are so few people walking around up there, then nature is doing well there and recovering the old structures.

Thanks to CREA in organising this as few people get to do a tour of the base.

Spadeadam Accommodation

If you are looking for Spadeadam accommodation then why not stay at Tantallon House Bed and Breakfast?