Ballistic missile launch site

Three Thor missiles once lived here, each carrying a W49 warhead, for a total yield of about 4MT: about 200 times the yield of the weapons used in Japan. Sixty of these were deployed in the UK between 1958 and 1963. Among other things this would have ensured that England would have been targeted by enough Soviet weapons that all these sites would have been destroyed. Given the low accuracy of ballistic missiles this means that civil defence would have been somewhat irrelevant during that period.

Probably there were never warheads here. [Yes, there were: I was wrong.]

The last descendent of Thor was the Delta II launcher, retired in 2018.

Today there are hares, deer in the scrubland covering a runway, kites, a kestrel, illegally-dumped rubbish, huge stacks of bales, piles of manure leaching awfulness into the soil.