The gorse awakens

Forty years ago, Greenham Common was home to 96 nuclear warheads and era-defining protests. Now, butterflies have replaced the B-47s, as Dave Hamilton discovers on a walk with a Star Wars twist

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The coconut scent of bright-yellow gorse flowers wafts around me as the gravel path crunches beneath my feet. Darting in and out of my peripheral vision, damselflies and dragonflies dance and dive, battling out dominance over large pools of water.

Life is around me; bees buzz over pink-purple heather flowers, grasshoppers make their presence known across grassland speckled with wildflowers. Overhead a skylark darts straight upward like a harrier jet, its distinctive call, broken and frenetic, echoes across wide-open skies as I watch it climb ever upward.

Modern farming methods have meant the habitat of these ground-nesting birds has been threatened but here, at an abandoned airbase on Greenham Common, near Newbury in Berkshire, they're soaring above me.

Greenham and neighbouring Crookham is a rare inland heath, the largest of its kind in this part of England. But 40 years ago, this wildlife reserve fringed by pools, reedbeds, rivers, canal paths, streams and ancient woodland was about as far removed from wildlife as you can get.

In the early 1980s, NATO decided that RAF Greenham Common would become one of two sites to house the United States Air Force's arsenal of ground-launched cruise missiles, all 96 complete with a thermonuclear warhead. If deployed, these bombs would be capable of wiping out millions of lives across Soviet Union-controlled Europe.

Having such destructive power on British shores was not something the population at the time took lightly. Before the weapons even arrived, what would become one of the most talked about protests in the world, the Greenham Common Peace Camps, took up residence just outside the perimeter gates.

A HISTORY OF PROTEST