[Retlaw]

Originally Posted by disco

Hi Rentlaw

The bullets that i have been finding are to the southern side of Hameldon and the northern side above Mitchell's Reservoir. The fields are littered with bullets, there must be thousands of them.

I believe that part of this area was used as a dummy air field during the second world war. I cant say for sure if this is right or not.
Anyway I was detecting the area I believe to be the air field when I picked up a signal different to the one given off for the bullets. So out came the trowel and down I went and guess what I found, an RAF cap badge.

Also when you stand in what i call the air raid shelter and look through the missing brick in the blast wall you will notice that the dry stone walls have been laid in such a fashion as to give the affect of an air field. I also believe that there was dummy areoplanes built from a type of cardboard on the site

You'd be surprised at th distance and direction a .303 bullet will travel, the safety zone behind the target area of a range without butt stops is supposed to be 3 miles, that building was to house the generators, they were on the right at the end of the passage, the other room had bunk beds in it, if you look at that brick wall with the opening in it you will find that pepperd, donkeys years ago my father and I had a block of wood that we used to hide in that shelter, it fit in that hole, we used to pin targets on it, as for what was on that field we never knew, as they had armed guards to all the known pathways into that area, only the farmer at Mitchell House Farm was allowed in, ( owd Tommy used to tell me about it after the war, wish I'd listened more) we couldn't even get to pick the whimberries. There was a 5 mile swathe of those sites on all the moorland between Liverpool & Manchester, (there was a simillar site on the Burnley side) it was supposed to fool jerry navigators , can't say it worked very well, I could see the search lights and the ack ack flashes from my bedroom window as jerry circled over Salford.