A beautiful sunny day in West Berkshire; just the afternoon to go strolling on the common. Skylarks climbed high in the blue overhead, pouring out passionate song. Golden cowslips and pale pink milkmaids bobbed in the breeze. Cows grazed contentedly. Beneath their hooves, under the turf of the common, lay hidden the ghostly shape of the runway that once slashed its concrete scar across this heath. Beyond the fence squatted the truncated, toad-like shapes of silos which held the doomsday weapons that, in the event of war at the end of the 20th century, would have lifted off the runway in the bellies of USAF bombers, bound for a dropping point somewhere over Russia.
‘I stumbled on Greenham Common while I was taking the dogs for a walk, some time after we moved to the area in 1978,’ mused Derek Emes, Chairman of Greenham and Crookham Conservation Volunteers, as we strolled the common together. A retired civil engineer who’s worked all over the world, Derek and a band of like-minded volunteers have laboured tirelessly to restore the disused Greenham Common cruise missile base to its former state of ecological richness. ‘The nuclear silos were just being built, but the whole place was in a dormant state; the fence had been allowed to deteriorate, and I found I could get in and out pretty much as I pleased. I thought: what a lovely place! Of course, once the cruise missiles were installed and the first women’s protest group arrived from Wales, the ‘Women for Life on Earth’, everything changed.’
Greenham Common is not like any other common in these islands. From the Second World War until 1997 it was an air base, run for the most part by the United States Air Force; and for eight of those years, 1983-1991, it housed cruise missiles with a nuclear capability. No-one who watched television news in the haunted years of the 1980s, with international tension sharp and the Iron Curtain giving no hint of melting away, could fail to remember the Women’s Peace Camp that established itself outside the gates, nor the fence-scalings, incursions, sit-down protests, chants, televised struggles with stolid policemen, and other ways that the women found to keep their anti-missile cause in the headlines.
‘The peace women weren’t especially unpopular hereabouts,’ noted Derek. ‘But they weren’t exactly welcome, either. Greenham Common is really two neighbouring commons, Greenham and Crookham, and the women found out that some local commoners still enjoyed ancient rights of access to Crookham Common. So they befriended them, and were able to get onto that section and carry on publicising their cause.’
Eventually the peace women saw their mission fulfilled. By 1992 the USSR’s policy of glasnost or open engagement with the West had neutralized its perceived threat. The nuclear missiles of Greenham Common were removed and returned to the USA. Five years later the air base was closed, and the MoD handed Greenham Common over to Newbury District Council and the Greenham Trust. Since then the 1,200 acres of Greenham and Crookham Commons have been managed as one enormous nature reserve.
Two factors vie for your attention as you walk the common: the natural world that is re-establishing itself with astonishing speed, and the ominous remains of the air base that still lie in situ. Here are mires and sphagnum bogs, ponds and streams, acid grassland, mown meadows where orchids thrive – bee orchids with their bumble-bee-bum patterns, green-winged orchids, Autumn lady’s tresses with tiny white flowers. Hares, rabbits, weasels and foxes find refuge here. Dartford warblers nest, and so do skylarks and woodlarks. The common is bright with great blue drifts of viper’s bugloss, yellow of ragwort and purple-pink of rosebay willowherb, and the pink 5-petalled stars of lime-loving common centaury. These thrive next to acid soil plants such as bell heather, in patches where lime leaching out of the broken old runways has enriched the surrounding heathland. Nearby, old air base buildings quietly crumble. The cruise missile silos, green flat-topped pyramids with dark entrances, squat behind a triple layer of fencing like the burial mounds of long-superseded warriors. And a fire-practice plane lies in its moat of water, no longer blasted with flame in simulated emergency, silently rusting itself away.
This wonderful variety of wildlife, the resurgence of the common’s ecological riches after half a century in the shadow of military development, has not come about by chance. ‘All sorts of ideas were put forward for the base when it was closed,’ said Derek, ‘a housing estate, a new airport for London, a car racing track. But in the end we got what we were lobbying for. The Greenham Trust bought the entire site for about £7 million, and leased the Greenham and Crookham commons to West Berkshire Council for one pound. Our conservation volunteers meet on the third Sunday of each month and we go out on a task – scrub-bashing, perhaps, or clearing away rubble, cleaning up the ponds or maybe doing some hedge-laying or putting in a footbridge. Little improvements, but persistent.’
The shadow of the past still lies long on this wild place, lending it an extraordinary poignancy. And the Greenham and Crookham Conservation Volunteers can’t afford to be complacent, insists their Chairman. ‘The commons themselves may be safe now, but we’re always having to challenge applications for inappropriate development around the perimeter – intrusive lights, too-tall factories, increases in road noise and transport movements.’ Derek Emes swept his arm wide in a gesture that embraced wild flowers, ponds, woods and streamlets. ‘It’s just so beautiful when it’s all out in full colour on a day like this. A miracle, really, to think what it was like only ten years ago. And we are completely determined to keep it safe for the future. That’s what it’s all about.’
Information on Greenham and Crookham Conservation Volunteers (www.gccv.org.uk):
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- GCCV Secretary Derek Cutt: derekcutt@economist.com
- West Berks County Council Countryside Officer: 01635-874381; sbarnett@westberks.gov.uk
Greenham Common is one of 500 wild places described and explored in Christopher Somerville’s latest fully-illustrated book, Britain and Ireland’s Best Wild Places – 500 Ways to Discover the Wild (Allen Lane, £25)