New Forest National Park

E-mail sent to ARG for your info:

To whom it may concern,
this is a general call for information, help or suggestions from your members relating to World War II airfields in the New Forest. The National Park has recently been awarded funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund for a two year project: New Forest Remembers - Untold Stories of World War II. This project intends to address the lack of survey work, knowledge and understanding about the New Forest’s role in World War II and hopes to bring the war years alive for a wide range of people including residents, visitors, school children and community groups, offering a wide range of volunteering opportunities for those who might wish to be further involved. We are currently pulling together as much information as possible to build a detailed picture of the WWII activity in the New Forest. Another element of our work is to create a huge online interactive portal on our website containing pictures, oral histories, aerial photos (modern & historic), videos and archaeological
mapping, !
so visitors, residents and local schools can initially search and research in one place (rather than visiting 15 different sites to start off with) before potentially being signposted to other more detailed sites. to make this work we are encouraging local residents, visitors to upload old photos and memories and we are also working with numerous partners to digitise and display some of their data with relevant credit lines to build a huge New Forest database that is all publicly accessible as archaeology should be. I would appreciate any information, suggestions, memories, plans of any of the airfields in the New Forest; Calshot, Ibsley, Beaulieu, Holmsley, Stoney Cross, Winkton, Bisterne, Needs Ore, Lymington and Sway. We have already begun working closely with Friends of New Forest Airfields, Ibsley historical group and the Forestry Commission, but we are continually looking to cast our nets wider and produce a very detailed survey of the New Forest during the war years.

Many thanks and I look forward to hearing from you or your members.
Thank you,
James Brown

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I couldn't agree more WJT. With this partly in mind I have already sent you an e-mail regarding a new address. If that goes ahead then perhaps we might be in a stronger position to do exactly what you have suggested.