RAF Milfield

In the fields south of the henge reconstruction, close to where the gliding club currently operate, stood RAF Milfield.

The military aviation history of the Milfield Basin begins in the Great War (1914-1918), when 77 Squadron of Edinburgh chose a field at Woodbridge as a landing and refuelling site for their patrols of southern Scotland. This began in 1917 and the site fell out of use after 1919.

It was not until 1940 that the Milfield area was surveyed again by the military for the construction of a base for training Bomber Command crew. However, before the construction began the station was changed to a Fighter Command facility. The base was designed as a Class A expansion field, which consisted of a triangular arrangement of landing strips and dispersed buildings to minimise casualties and damage in the event of an enemy attack.

The training facilities did not exist in isolation, and RAF Milfield was the central facility in a series of training sites throughout North Northumberland. One of the satellite facilities was RAF Brunton, near Beadnell, where pilots were transported for lectures and practical demonstrations. Air-to-ground attack training was undertaken in different locales, with fields at Doddington North Moor used as dive bombing ranges, and Goswick Sands as a live firing range for air-to-ground rockets from 1944 onwards.