Cowden Range

The plan below shows all the different target areas as they were in 1952. I don't know when the sea targets were moved or removed but by 1962 an Admiralty chart shows sea targets within the smaller area whose southern latitude is north of Aldbrough and probably a similar danger area to that when it closed.

The map shows all the quadrant locations and the danger areas of the bombing ranges. It also shows that the most southerly range was a live rocket projectile target and these would always be at sea and would normally include an extra danger arc beyond the circular danger area.

Hopefully a layout of the range in the following decades will be released in the near future.

I suspect there is a clause that allows for live bombing on certain occasions on some ranges with special permission. Larkhill was one of those exceptions in the sixties and I think the seventies when trials or demonstrations sometimes required live bombs. Not sure about the eighties but suspect by then it was only Garvie as canberra said. By the late fifties and sixties the Middle East ranges took a lot of the heat (sorry about the pun), but this region is something I know little about. I suspect we got used to dropping bombs in the desert in the twenties and thirties and just carried on

I have attached an aerial photo from 1992 showing the features visible and enhanced by me. The three square pyramids that form the direction indicators for air to ground ranges seem to have originated as a range requirement in the late forties and continued into the current era, as far as I am aware. The little dots I assumed were lights and the arrows clearly show these although it wasn't clear on the white line near the three arrows together. Were those dots lights?

The northern target looks to have been a practice bombing target and the two lead in lines either side of the target are visible on some Google Earth historic layers (eg 2004) but the target area itself is now mostly washed away and may be the cause of the flurry of practice bombs in the last 20 years..

The southern gun targets were sadly off the edge of the photo but assume they were cleared rectangle of ground with frame targets. Were these bigger than the wartime 10ft as I did think they might be 15ft or 20ft square?

Having spent some time looking at Cowden I did look at Street view on Google Earth and noticed it took you up to the old admin site and just short of the barrier. Sadly the buildings were obscured by trees. The main road view also include the posts to the old entrance to the original control tower at Collin Hill. The Getmapping website includes coverage from 1999 and shows the 1980s control tower still standing, but the other towers seem to have been demolished if they hadn't already fallen onto the beach.

I have some coverage from 1972 so may try the same thing on those.

More from Cowden, this time from 1972. Again I have enhanced some of the features including some that were not in use at the time. The arrow in the middle of the range was very faded on the photo and was a remnant of the original 1952 layout, although the corresponding target left no trace. I haven't marked the various quadrants and a number were still in place in 1972 although which ones were still in use I couldn't say.

It does appear that the range was changing constantly, not only because bits of it were falling into the sea but as requirements and standards changed. This makes it difficult, from aerial photos alone, to work out what was active at the time of the photo.