Rory Walsh visits a Lincolnshire landmark that shaped the sky and once provided radar for RAF Stenigot
Discovering Britain
View • Rural • East Midlands • Web Guide
Imagine landscape poets and most of us will picture the Romantics, who wrote about the stirring sights of misty mountains and rushing waterfalls. There are few sonnets and odes about everyday infrastructure. In the 1930s, however, Stephen Spender was sparked into verse by electricity pylons. Spender’s poem The Pylons describes them as ‘Nude giant girls that have no secret’. His line flashes to mind just outside Donington on Bain, in the south of the Lincolnshire Wolds.
Head north towards Louth along the hedge-lined road of Manor Hill and a distinctive tower appears on the left. Standing 110-metres tall
and dwarfing a redbrick house beside it, the structure looks like a large pylon. Yet unlike the telegraph poles across the road, the tower hasn’t any cables or wires leading into the distance. Plus, there isn’t another pylon in sight. Giant and nude, what is its secret?
The tower belonged to RAF Stenigot, an airbase built in 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War. Stenigot formed part of the Chain Home radar defence system, the world’s first of its type. This series of radar masts along Britain’s eastern coast detected incoming enemy aircraft. Stenigot was one of Chain Home’s vital links. As Luftwaffe pilots flew over Lincolnshire to raid factories in Nottingham and Manchester, this quiet rural area became a military front line.
Key to winning the air was the lie of the land. The RAF built more than 70 bases in Lincolnshire. The county is the second largest in England, stretching across 6,975 square kilometres. It’s surrounded by water, from the North Sea to the Fens, sparsely populated and famously flat. The summit of the Wolds (Wolds Top) only reaches a meagre 168 metres in elevation, while large areas in the Fens are below sea level. Lincolnshire’s location, size, space and shape all contributed to it becoming the ‘bomber county’.
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However, radar works best at high altitude, so the Stenigot tower stands at one of Lincolnshire’s highest points. This meant that the base saw active service for decades after the Second World War. During the late 1950s, Stenigot became part of ACE High, NATO’s nuclear early-warning system, which spanned from Norway to Turkey. The radar tower was joined by four huge satellite dishes.
After RAF Stenigot shut, the dishes rusted in peace for decades before being scrapped in late 2020. The radar tower, meanwhile, is Grade II Listed. In Spender’s poem, a line of pylons crossing the countryside is ‘tall with prophecy’, providing ‘the quick perspective of the future’. Stenigot’s solitary survivor is an enduring reminder of the past.
