BLAKEHILL Farm nature reserve’s wartime past takes off later this month in a festival of flight.

The spot near Cricklade played a major part in the June 1944 D Day and later Arnhem landings.

Now the transport planes and gliders have gone and the site is home to skylarks, lapwings and owls as well as deer, hares and butterflies and the runways are gradually being restored to hay meadows.

But the Dakotas and the people who flew in them will be remembered on August 19 with music, displays and an appearance by a Second World War re-enactment group.

The event, staged by Wiltshire Wildlife Trust with backing from the Heritage Lottery Fund, will celebrate all sorts of flight and is set to include a flypast by a Spitfire from the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight, a tethered hot air balloon and a static falconry display.

Amy Blount, the trust’s connections activities co-ordinator, said: “You can go to the site and think it is an empty field with nothing special about it, but it is events like this that bring its history to life.”

Little remains of the runways, hangars and other buildings at the base, once home to 233 Sqn, which flew 30 Dakotas carrying paratroopers on D Day and lost four of them.

During the first few days of Operation Market Garden at Arnhem it flew more than 30 sorties and lost three aircraft.

Another squadron based at a sister airfield just a couple of miles away at Down Ampney, 271, also dropped men from the 3 Parachute Brigade and towed Horsa gliders during the allied landings.

Later, during the battle for the bridge at Arnhem one of its pilots, Flt Lt David Lord, 30, won a posthumous Victoria Cross who managed to drop all of his badly-needed supplies to British troops on the ground even though his plane had been hit by anti-aircraft fire.

Seconds later, just after he had ordered the crew to bail out, it crashed in flames, killing all but the navigator.

Among those flying from the airfield were WAAF air ambulance nurses nicknamed the Flying Nightingales who went over to France a week after D Day to look after wounded soldiers on casualty evacuation flights back to the UK.

They were a forerunner of the casualty evacuation flights still carried out by the RAF, landing at nearby Brize Norton.

One special guest at the festival will be air despatch veteran Gordon Miles, who served there during the war.

The airfield closed in the 1950s and was an experimental site for GCHQ for some years. Now its history is shared in War to Wildlife guided talks by volunteer warden and local historian Vince Povey.

“They have been really popular and they have drawn a lot more of an audience in. Everyone who comes pretty much says they never knew the place was there,” said Amy.

“It is another draw for other people who might not come to a nature reserve for wildlife.”

Where the aircraft once waited at dispersal meadow flowers like ladies bedstraw, oxeye daisies and birdsfoot trefoil grow, providing almost 50 per cent of the government’s 10 year target for restoring the country’s hay meadows and encouraging different species of butterflies and birds.

Grass snakes, bats and 14 different species of dragonfly have also made it their home.

Organisers are hoping Mother Nature will be on their side after last year’s event had to be abandoned due to serious weather warnings.

The day, which also includes crafts and stalls runs from 11am to 4pm and admission is free.