'Lost' Shropshire WW2 airfield identified with National Trust help

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-shropshire-32453413

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A conservation charity has helped a woman identify a "lost" World War Two airfield where her father flew.

Elizabeth Halls, from Herefordshire, is making a tour of 60 aerodromes where her father, Flight Lieutenant Bryan Wild, landed Defiant planes.

Mr Wild died in 2012 and Mrs Halls used his memoirs to identify the sites, one of which, named "Uppingdon", she had struggled to find.

But the National Trust believes the site was at Uckington in Shropshire.

Six-month tour

Mrs Halls, from Stansbatch near Leominster, enlisted the help of an aviation historian to edit her father's memoirs, which have now been published.

She has embarked on a sponsored six-month tour of the airfields in a 1935 Singer Le Mans sports car, similar to one her father owned during the war, to raise money for the RAF Benevolent Fund.

While in Shropshire, she will also be visiting an old RAF airfield at High Ercall, where her father was stationed for two weeks in 1942.

"Dad talks about Uppingdon Airfield in his notes, but although there is a village of that name, I can't find any mention of an airfield," she said.

"I do know that it was next to Attingham Park, which is where the US base Atcham was, so it may be that my father is referring to Atcham, but I would love to find out for sure."

Bob Thurston, countryside parks and gardens manager at Attingham Park said he believed Mrs Halls was "almost certainly" referring to Uckington, at the south east edge of the Atcham airfield.

"One of the runways was on Uckington farm fields," he said.

"To confuse matters, there are also the villages of Uppington and Uffington nearby, though they had no airfield or airfield buildings associated with them."