The path at the back of Blewbury…
…where the hazel stigma (female flowers) are already out.
Approaching Lowbury Hill (left horizon).
The dryer in Grumble Bottom, north of Juniper Valley, on the way towards Aston Tirrold. Briefly the sun came out, on what was otherwise a very grey day.
Photos of Juniper Valley were just a featureless grey/green mess, so instead here’s a painting of Juniper Valley by Anna Dillon, who joined us on the walk
Juniper Valley: Oil painting. Reproduced by kind permission of Anna Dillon
Top right of the picture, maybe the yellowish field, is the site of a WWII decoy airfield. In the trees, at the bottom of the picture, in Grumble Bottom, was a decoy bunker. When German bombers were approaching, the “guys” would run up the hill and light kerosine flares to simulate an airfield and tempt the bombers to drop their bombs here, rather than on Didcot with its massive ordnance depot. We are not aware of any bomb craters, although a Junker crashed nearby in November 1940.
Hans Bossdorf, who was the only son of a German farming family, was buried with full military honours in Harwell Cemetery…. His grave there was treated with great care and respect by the villagers, some of whom were most upset when in the 1960s it was exhumed and relocated by the War Graves Commission to a large German military area in the Cannock Chase Military Cemetery. [Source: Oxford Mail]
Back to the bunkers:
All the generators, wiring and communications gear was removed from the bunkers at the end of the war. Bizarely the government tried to persuade the landowners to buy the structures, but most refused, so they were just left in place for the farmer/landowner to use as they pleased. Most have now been removed, or just merged back into the landscape, but here this one still is, although crumbling away after 80 years.
The entrance would have been up on the inside of the hill
While the front was a brick “blast” wall.
Despite being winter, the hazel treees have grown a lot and make it hard to see what’s left. The picture above, and the next one, were taken 4 years ago on 30 Dec 2020
Anna refered me to a book Fields of Deception by Colin Dobinson
“During the Second World War, a secret department was formed at Britain’s Air Ministry to co-ordinate a strategy to defeat German bombing by means of deception. With the help of leading technicians from the film industry, ingeniously designed decoy airfields, towns and military bases were built throughout the island.”
Some 800 decoy sites were built, and it is estimated at about 5% of the bombs dropped landed on decoy sites, saving perhaps some 2,200 lives and other damage to war-time infrastructure.
This decoy is listed as an Army Decoy (A Series). Parent site is Didcot, and the location is named as Moulsford. The map reference (SU 539831) is actually the middle of Juniper Valley, half way between the decoy bunkers and the decoy airfield.
The structure is type QF/QL – Q Fire and Q Lights.
Schematic of the bunker (thanks Anna) at Coed Y Paen (Wales!) of the same QF/QL type, and hence the same as the Grumble Bottom bunker.
And here’s the Air Ministry Drawing of a QL shelter.
I’m still reading the book, and will update this page as I find out more. For example, the field is unlikely to be a dummy runway with kerosine flares. Much more likely to be an impression of what the Ordnance Depot in Didcot would look like from the air, with a series of lights laid out appropriately.
Here’s one schematic “Typical layout of an oil QF” Lots of boiling oil involved – what could possibly go wrong.
Credit: Fields of Deception, page 148, Fig 34.
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2 replies on “Photos from a walk on 16th January from Blewbury to Juniper Valley”
Very informative David, given that I wasn’t there. Good research.
Thanks David, some interesting stuff!