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Concrete footprints in a green landscape

Stand on a footpath on the Blackdown Hills or out across the Somerset Levels, and the countryside looks timeless: hedgerows, pasture, willows and a church tower on the skyline. Look again, though, and the twentieth century starts to show through. A long straight edge where a hedge should curve. A grey band of concrete running beside a field of maize. A squat brick building with small, high windows and a flat roof, quietly serving as a farm store.

Somerset is dotted with the remains of wartime airfields, built at speed between 1940 and 1944 and abandoned almost as quickly once the fighting stopped. They are among the most evocative, and most easily overlooked, historic sites in the county. You do not need a museum ticket to visit them. You do need to know what you are looking at.

What survives, and what to look for

Very little of an airfield survives intact, but the pieces that do are surprisingly informative. On a walk or a drive past a former station, keep an eye out for:

• Runway and perimeter track fragments — often reused as farm tracks, hardstanding for silage clamp, or the base for a barn. Concrete with visible expansion joints is a strong clue.
• The control tower or watch office — usually the most substantial building left, sometimes converted into a house or workshop, occasionally standing roofless and full of brambles.
• Dispersal pens and blast shelters — curved earthen banks and low brick structures around the edges of the flying field, once used to spread aircraft out against attack.
• Pillboxes and defensive posts — the airfield perimeter was a defended site, and many of these small concrete boxes remain in hedges and along lanes.
• Nissen huts, Stanton shelters and domestic site remains — often further from the runways, near the road, where accommodation and mess halls once stood.
• Memorials — simple stone plinths, plaques and flagpoles marking squadrons, losses and the men and women who served here.

The stations that shaped the Blackdowns and the Levels

The high ground above Taunton proved ideal for fighter stations. Culmhead, up on the Blackdown Hills, opened in 1941 and became home to a succession of fighter squadrons, including Czechoslovak and Polish units whose pilots flew sweeps over France. The site is now a mix of farmland and forestry, with a memorial that draws families and veterans back year after year.

Further east, Merryfield near Ilminster was built for training and glider operations, later passing to the Royal Navy and still used today for helicopter training — a rare case of an airfield that never quite closed. On the Levels, stations such as Westonzoyland were pressed into service as training grounds and satellite fields, their flat, well-drained ground a gift to wartime planners and a challenge ever since, as drainage and flooding have reclaimed much of what was built.

Not everything was real. Somerset also hosted decoy sites: dummy airfields of canvas, timber and lights, designed to draw enemy bombers away from the genuine stations. Their traces are subtler still — a scatter of concrete pads in a field, a curious absence of hedges — and they are among the most fragile remains of all.

Why these sites are fragile

Wartime airfields were never built to last. They were laid down quickly, often on requisitioned farmland, using materials that were meant to see out the war rather than a century. Add eighty years of weather, and the pressures mount steadily.

• Agriculture is the biggest factor. Ploughing deepens, machinery grows heavier, and concrete that once seemed indestructible is broken up and buried or removed.
• Scrub and tree roots quietly prise apart brickwork and lift slabs. What looks like natural regeneration is often the slow demolition of a building.
• Development eats at the edges of former domestic sites, where flat, well-drained land close to a main road is exactly what housing and industrial estates want.
• Casual damage — metal detecting on protected ground, off-road vehicles on runways, fires in shelters — can remove in an afternoon what survived for decades.
• Memory loss is real too. Once the last people who served there have gone, a concrete slab has no story attached unless somebody writes it down.

How local groups are holding the line

Across the county, volunteers are doing steady, unglamorous work. Parish councils and history societies record oral histories from veterans and landowning families. Archaeology groups survey earthworks and photograph buildings before they fall. Conservation volunteers clear scrub from a watch office or a dispersal pen, then step back and let the structure breathe. Research teams dig through archives to match a runway to a squadron, a hut to a name.

Practical protection often comes down to designation. Some remains are scheduled monuments, which brings legal protection and a requirement for consent before any works. Others are recorded on historic environment registers, listed buildings, or local heritage lists. Where designation is not possible, a simple management agreement with a farmer — keeping a strip unploughed, leaving a building standing — can be enough to save a site for another generation.

Memorials matter as much as concrete. A well-kept stone, an information board and an annual service turn an anonymous field into a place people understand and respect.

Visiting with care

Most former airfields sit on private land, crossed by public footpaths and quiet lanes. Enjoy them from the path, close gates, keep dogs under control and take litter home. Never enter a derelict building — roofs and floors are often unstable, and asbestos is common. Leave anything you find where it lies; a fragment of aircraft, a buckle or a cartridge case belongs to the site and to the record, not to a pocket.

If you want to do more, join a local heritage or archaeology group, offer to photograph and measure a building before it goes, or simply write down what an older neighbour remembers. Somerset's wartime airfields are a reminder that ordinary countryside can hold extraordinary history — and that keeping it takes nothing more than attention, a little care and a willingness to look twice.