Tag Archives: RAF Machrihanish

Campbeltown’s Lawrence Tynes plays for New York Giants in tonight’s Super Bowl XLVI

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(Updated below: He did it.) Tonight could see Lawrence Tynes double sole holder of a unique record. Continue reading →

Campbeltown steps up to the plate on Machrihanish airbase

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Control Tower Campbeltown Airport

We said in a recent piece that the exciting spectrum of initiatives and opportunities that have now come together Continue reading →

Campbeltown Grammar School raises £11,000 for Children in Need

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The news that Campbeltown Grammar School has raised the huge amount Continue reading →

Senion team from HIE are in Kintyre meeting business leaders

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A senior team from Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) is in Kintyre to look at how local partnerships can work together to tackle the challenges facing the area.

Chief Executive Sandy Cumming, Chair William Roe and HIE’s Argyll team are met business and community leaders at a dinner last night (5th March) and are making a series of visits in Kintyre today.

William Roe, Chair of HIE, says: ‘We are delighted to be in Kintyre to explore with local people the issues affecting them. Partnership between government, business and representative bodies is very important in ensuring that we can effectively tackle the considerable challenges which still affect the area’.

As well as the business dinner at Craigard House Hotel, the HIE team is visiting Campbeltown Creamery to hear about its expansion plans, golfing complex Machrihanish Dunes (winner of the Best Sporting Facility Award in the ForArgyll 2008 Awards) and RAF Machrihanish – now for sale.

It seems odd that the team is not visiting the Vestas wind turbine complex, which would be, even pre-eminently, an obviously needy target. This omission can really only be interpreted one way – that the future of the plant must now be secured. If it were not, the HIE senior team would have had a serious need to engage with workers at the plant.

On the visit as a whole, Chief Executive Sandy Cumming commented: ‘This visit is part of a series of events which we are holding across the Highlands and Islands.  It is vital that at this time of global economic uncertainty we have the chance to speak first hand to our customers, partners and stakeholders’.

This sort of attention to the needs of Kintyre is very welcome. Bringing together this spectrum of expertise to familiarise itself with the area, the issues and very real potential has to be positive.

Tough action on anti-social driving in Campbeltown but…

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Campbeltown has long been plagued – indeed intimidated – by what is referred to as ‘anti-social driving’ in and through the town.

Argyll’s MSP, Jim Mather, has been in touch with the Chief Constable’s office and has now been assured by Chief Superintendant John Thompson of ‘L’ Division that the local force is fully aware of the matter and has been very active in policing it. He has told Mr Mather that ‘a considerable number’ of Fixed Penalty notices have been issued in such incidents. The Anti-Social Behaviour (Scotland) Act has also been invoked and in some cases used to seize vehicles through the use of ASBO notices.

This is a difficult issue and it is one aggravated by the division of the generations. When you’re older, as many of Argyll’s population are, you are very aware of your own vulnerability and find the sheer strength and vigour of young people frightening. Often they are just being young and, with little experience yet, have no idea how daunting their energy is to older people or what the consequences of their actions might be if something went wrong.

Remember what it was like when you got your first wheels? It was a mixture of the sharp reaction times of the young, utter self-confidence, limited skills and less experience but exhilaration in mastering a machine, testing your independence and loving the attention. It just doesn’t occur that the noise of revving engines, slamming doors, screaming brakes and handbrake turns scares the living daylights of people at risk if you lose it and who dare not cross the road. Being told that you’re keeping people awake just doesn’t make sense because you don’t know what it’s like to need sleep.

Of course this sort of behaviour cannot be allowed to run rampant around a town. And of course if the law is the only solution it has got to come down hard and clear. But being young anywhere is not easy and being young down the end of Kintyre and in a place dealing as constantly with deprivation as Campbeltown certainly narrows your options.

RAF Machrihanish is being sold off. There’s a lot of space out there. What about a kart track and a stock car racing track? Together these would hone skills that might breed future champion drivers for Argyll and bring audiences for thrilling family activities and events to a place that needs this sort of boost.

Strathclyde Police also has both a good policy and some first class officers in its Community Police service. Those attached to the Campbeltown force might welcome a development like this and could use it to build more productive relationships with the young people of the area.

Mysterious Mothballed Machrihanish for Market

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At least there’s some good news for Campbeltown after the Vestas decampment. The RAF airbase at Machrihanish on Argyll’s Mull of Kintyre, mothballed since 1996, has been judged surplus to requirements and will be sold. While the future of Campbeltown Airport will have to be secured (it uses the runway built for the RAF), freeing up this considerable resource carries new opportunities for the economy of Kintyre. The announcement was made on Monday (6th October) by Defence Minister Kevan Jones, newly appointed to the defence department in Gordon Brown’s recent reshuffle.

From the 1960s onwards the Machrihanish base was a key element in cold war negotiations. For three decades it was host to an intelligence unit providing the USA with information to maintain its bargaining position during that time. It was a nuclear depth-charge storage facility requiring an extensive underground infrastructure which may have played a part in some of the theories about the nature pf the base. It was a training base for US special forces – a detachment of SEALs (Sea and Land forces), the nature of whose training has never been specified. This also fuelled the speculations outlined below.

With the end of the Cold War came a gradual run-down of the base until 1996 when it was closed, with only twenty staff remaining on a maintenance and repair basis.

That covers the ‘mothballed’ bit. Now for the mysterious. A series of not-quite-explained oddities about RAF Machrihanish, its resources and personnel, has long sustained suspicion that it was a test base for top secret American-generated flying machines of one kind or another. It is referred to on a range of Internet sites as ‘the UK’s (or Scotland’s) Area 51′.

Inside the huge US AirForce Test and Training Range in Nevada in the western USA. on the south shore of Groom Lake, is a large military airfield. This is described as the most secret place on earth. It does not appear on US Government maps (USGS), the equivalent of our Ordnance Survey maps. It is nicknamed Area 51. Other nicknames the base attracts include: Dreamland, Paradise Ranch, Home Base and Groom Lake. It exists to support the development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. Miitary pilots call the forbidden airspace around it as ‘the box’. The American government barely acknowledges its existence, only admitting to it in 2003.

Area 51 is also known as Roswell, the site of the alleged postmortems carried out on aliens said to have been recovered from the wreck of a UFO supposedly found in the area.

What has all of this got to do with RAF Machrihanish? If you have fun clicking through the links at the foot of this article, you’ll find out. Basically a range of conspiracy theories of varying degrees of plausibiity have arisen from a mixture of some acknowledged facts of highly secret testing of development aircraft at the base alongside some oddities never really accounted for.

What were those ‘oddities’?

  • There was a small and quite secret group of American SEALs (Sea, Air and Land Forces) based there – doing what? They weren’t seen much in the area outside the base.
  • The runway at RAF Machrihanish is unusually long at 10,000 ft. The need for this length remains inadequately explained.
  • The base contains a mysterious hangar whose function is imperfectly explained: the Gaydon Hangar.

Over the years there have been a number of unexplained sightings of UFOs in the Kintyre area which, added to the truth that the base was indeed used for top secret testing of American aircraft in development and the other facts above, has led to the base being known as ‘Scotland’s Area 51′. The secret American airbase is itself the focus of a lot of UFO sightings.

The wilder theories are that the Americans took secret information on flight evolution from the crashed UFO from which the Roswell aliens were recovered and that this information was used to breed revolutionary military aircraft which, if seen in testing, were thought to be UFOs. And as in Area 51, so in Scotland’s Area 51.

The two links embedded in the text above are Wikipedia entries on Area 51 and on The Roswell Incident and are pretty factual. The sites linked to below – for your interest and delight – cover the spectrum.

Well? Argyll? You never know.