The weather window suddenly being kind, blue skies and a bit of a breeze over the flat lands of Norfolk. Living here, it’s easy to forget how lucky we are, the cliche of our vast skies gets lost as we all head off to places that have those curious walls of land all around them, the Peak District, The North York Moors, Dartmoor, the Chilterns or Wales. One of our group has been living in Eastern Europe for the last eighteen months, having grown up here, was quick to comment on the massive expanse of sky, ‘not penned in, it runs from edge to edge’. Our landscapes are made of various states of water, from the scooped out watery mass of the Broads to the fluid ribbon twists of the Rivers Bure, Ant, Yare and Thurne that feed these largely hand-dug pits before the slow fall-off outward into the sea.
We have or mountains of steam, the clouds that form here, not the grey lid we are so familiar with, but our slow moving peaks, the dark shapes like a distant shore across the North Sea.  The other sense you get is how the air works here. Planted in the landscape there are the old windpumps, set to stop the rising water taking the farmland back to the marsh it once itself formed from the slowly silted Romano-British estuary – mirrored by the turbines at Winterton and in the shoals off the coast. You can stand in this land and watch a sail full of air push through the reeds, a ship of the green desert, the water, always there, sometimes lost below your line of sight.

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Heigham Holmes opens once a year, for one day, it is ostensibly still a working farm, mostly beef and milk, a clump of building at the centre, grass lapping round them, a pneumatic bridge cuts it off from the surrounding land and the village of Martham and the cut which runs down to it; lined as it is with boats and pleasure craft.

The land is isolated by water, dykes and rivers surround it on every side. It’s isolated enough that it has been said to have been a Secret Operations Executives (SOE) base during the Second World War, this is possibly corroborated by some evidence from local aerial photography, recorded in the Norfolk HER and points at what could be an airstrip and some Nissen huts to the east of the strip. Activity here was also allegedly reported by locals, including stories of strangers drinking in and staying at the local pub. However, all of this is uncorroborated, and the main source of the information is from Norfolk and Suffolk Airfields and Airstrips’ (Part 6), authored by Huby Fairhead and published by the Norfolk & Suffolk Aviation Museum in June 1989, which remains uncorroborated, and beyond that there is almost evidence of anything being here.
What is available makes no mention of any flights; it has been suggested that 161 Squadron, which flew Lysanders – those stalwart short-takeoff and landing flew from here. This is really doubtful and completely uncorroborated as published records in the form of Operations Record Books (ORBs) indicate 161 who flew these operations to the Netherlands mostly did so from RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire. What is vaguely possible it is that it may have been a dummy airfield, or could have been used occasionally as a landing strip for Coastal Search and Rescue but both those also seem unlikely as again there’s no record, and you have to ask but why? Those flights were usually from either from RAF Matlask or RAF Coltishall.

What seems most likely is that this is all just be received-memory based on, stories about stories, which in turn are unreliable and based on seeing other aircraft in the area used for coastal search and rescue, or aircraft from nearby RAF Ludham in the vicinity. So basically what it was or whether in fact was ever anything at all is a bit of a mystery.
Whatever is the truth, nothing visible remains, and the landscape continues its silent.

Revised Jan 2025

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