The modern traveller driving north from Lincoln along the A15 is often unaware they are treading on ancient ground. This road, for the most part, follows the dead-straight course of Ermine Street, the great Roman artery that once connected Londinium to Lindum Colonia and north to Eboracum (York). Yet, just past the turn-off for the village of Brattleby, the ancient line is abruptly broken. The road deviates in a wide, modern curve to the east, skirting the perimeter of a vast airfield before rejoining its Roman trajectory further north. This sweeping bypass of concrete and tarmac is a 20th-century scar on a 2,000-year-old landscape. It was carved out of the Lincolnshire countryside in the 1950s to accommodate the immense new runway of RAF Scampton, a runway required for the jet-powered V-bombers that formed Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
This dramatic reconfiguration, which consumed acres of agricultural land including parts of Scampton’s Glebe Farm, is more than a footnote in local history. It stands as a powerful symbol of how the demands of modern, total war could reshape the rural environment with a finality and scale that rivalled the great landscape-altering projects of the past. The land around the Barony of Brattleby was not a passive recipient of this history; its very soil was requisitioned, bulldozed, and paved over, literally redrawn by the exigencies of the Cold War. To understand the significance of this act, we must first peel back the layers of history that lie beneath Scampton’s concrete.
An Ancient Road, A Viking Name
Long before any airfield, the defining feature of this landscape was Ermine Street. Engineered by Roman legionaries in the 1st century AD, it was a statement of imperial power and logistical necessity, slicing through the forests and marshes of pre-Roman Britain. It imposed a new order on the land, facilitating the movement of troops and goods, and anchoring the new province to the heart of the Empire. For centuries, it was the spine of the region. Roman villas, farms, and posting stations would have existed along its length, their inhabitants looking out upon the same gentle rise and fall of the Lincolnshire Edge that we see today. The road dictated the flow of life.
The Romans departed, but their road remained. As the Anglo-Saxons settled the area, new communities grew in the shadow-sm of the old imperial infrastructure. The very names of the local villages tell a story of successive waves of settlement. Scampton, recorded as Scantone in the Domesday Book of 1086, is likely of Old English origin, perhaps ‘Scanta’s farmstead’. Its immediate neighbour, Brattleby, however, speaks to a later, more violent, transformation of the region. Recorded as Brotelbi, its ‘-by’ suffix is pure Old Norse, the marker of a Danish or Norwegian settlement. It means ‘Brandr’s farm’ or ‘Brandr’s village’, a clear legacy of the Viking Great Army’s conquest of this part of Mercia in the 9th century and the subsequent creation of the Danelaw. Thus, by the eve of the Norman Conquest in 1066, the landscape around the future airfield was a palimpsest: a Roman road system overlaid with Anglo-Saxon and Viking farming communities, a patchwork of cultures etched into the land.
The Conqueror’s Men and the Bishop’s Manor
The Norman Conquest of 1066 was another violent imposition of a new order, one meticulously recorded in the Domesday Book twenty years later. This great survey was, in essence, a vast audit of the Conqueror’s new realm, assessing its economic potential for taxation and control. The entries for our villages are spare but revealing.
In 1086, Scampton was held by one of the pre-eminent Norman magnates, Gilbert de Gant, a nephew of the Conqueror himself. The entry records land for two plough teams, twenty acres of meadow, and a small wood, with a total taxable value of thirty shillings. Crucially, it had a church and a priest, the institution whose land—the glebe—would feature so prominently nine centuries later.
Brattleby, by contrast, was an ecclesiastical holding, belonging to the powerful Bishop of Lincoln, Remigius de Fécamp. Its Domesday entry is more substantial, listing land for three plough teams, a population of twelve villagers (villani) and three smallholders (bordarii), and sixty acres of meadow. As part of the Bishop’s vast estates, Brattleby’s inhabitants laboured not for a secular warlord but for the prince-bishop in his new, imposing cathedral rising on the hill at Lincoln.
For the next five hundred years, the life of these villages was governed by the rhythms of the manorial system and the agricultural year. The landscape would have been one of great, open fields, cultivated in strips by the villagers under the authority of the lord’s reeve. It was a landscape shaped by the plough, the scythe, and the obligations of feudal tenure. This was not always a peaceful existence. The strategic importance of Lincoln, with its castle and cathedral, meant the surrounding countryside was often caught in the crossfire of national conflicts. During the civil war known as The Anarchy, Lincolnshire saw significant fighting between the partisans of King Stephen and Empress Matilda. More famously, on 20 May 1217, the fields outside the city walls were the site of the Second Battle of Lincoln, a decisive conflict that expelled the French Prince Louis from England and secured the throne for the young Henry III, reaffirming the principles of Magna Carta signed two years prior. For the farmers of Brattleby and Scampton, such events meant the passage of armies, the requisitioning of food and fodder, and the ever-present threat of pillage—an older, more transient form of war’s impact on the land.
From Open Fields to Enclosed Farms
The medieval landscape of open fields and communal farming began to disappear from the 16th century onwards, but the process accelerated dramatically with the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries. This was another profound reconfiguration of the English countryside, arguably the most significant between the Norman settlement and the Industrial Revolution. In Lincolnshire, as elsewhere, enclosure acts privatised common land and consolidated the scattered strips of the open fields into the familiar chequerboard of privately owned fields bounded by hawthorn hedges that we largely see today.
The Enclosure Act for Scampton was passed in 1778. This act swept away the medieval strip system, re-allocating the land into compact, individual holdings. Glebe Farm, the land set aside for the upkeep of the parish priest and church, would have been consolidated at this time, becoming a distinct agricultural unit. This process was driven by a desire for agricultural efficiency and profit, but it fundamentally altered the social fabric and visual appearance of the village. The communal organisation of labour vanished, replaced by a landscape of private enterprise and wage labour. It was a rational, surveyor-drawn grid laid over the organic, custom-governed patterns of the past. This newly enclosed, orderly landscape would be the one that confronted the agents of a new kind of warfare in the early 20th century.
The Coming of the Flying Machine: Home Defence Flight Station Brattleby
The first hint of the seismic change to come arrived not with a bulldozer, but with the faint, unfamiliar drone of an aero-engine. In late 1916, with Britain facing the terrifying new threat of Zeppelin airship raids, the Royal Flying Corps scrambled to establish a chain of landing grounds for home defence squadrons. One such site was established on the flat, open fields between Ermine Street and the village of Scampton. Its official title was telling: ‘Home Defence Flight Station, Brattleby’. The larger and better-known name of Scampton would only be adopted later, but its genesis was inextricably linked with its smaller neighbour.
Opened on 13 October 1916, its purpose was to intercept the German naval Zeppelins that used the Lincolnshire coast as a landmark for their raids on the industrial heartlands of the Midlands. The first squadron to be based there, No. 33 Squadron, flew Royal Aircraft Factory B.E.2c fighters, flimsy-looking contraptions of wood, wire, and canvas. From their grass airstrip, pilots would ascend into the cold, dark skies, hunting for the monstrous, hydrogen-filled gasbags. Though they achieved little direct success from Brattleby/Scampton, their very presence marked a turning point. For the first time, war was not something that passed through the landscape on foot or horseback; it was now based within it, projecting power vertically into the third dimension. The ancient fields were now an operational military base. The base was renamed RFC Scampton in 1917, and after a period as a training school, it was closed following the armistice in 1919, the land returning to agriculture. For a brief period, it seemed the intrusion had been temporary.
The Lancaster’s Shadow and the Dambusters’ Dawn
The peace was short-lived. As the threat from Nazi Germany grew in the 1930s, Scampton was selected for redevelopment as part of the RAF’s massive Expansion Scheme. In 1936, the old site was completely rebuilt. Five large hangars rose from the fields, along with permanent brick barracks and administrative buildings. This was a far more intrusive and permanent military presence than the temporary huts of the First World War. The base became a key station in RAF Bomber Command, home to squadrons flying Handley Page Hampden and, later, Avro Manchester bombers.
Its transformation into a place of legend began in late 1941 and early 1942 with the arrival of the new four-engined heavy bomber that would become the backbone of the bombing campaign against Germany: the Avro Lancaster. From the newly-laid concrete runways of Scampton, hundreds of these mighty aircraft would heave themselves into the night sky, their Merlin engines a deafening roar that became the soundtrack to wartime life in Brattleby, Scampton, and the surrounding villages.
The base’s global fame was sealed in the spring of 1943. A new, highly-specialised unit, No. 617 Squadron, was formed at Scampton for a single, audacious mission: to destroy the great dams of Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Under the command of the 24-year-old Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the squadron trained in intense secrecy, flying specially modified Lancasters designed to carry Barnes Wallis’s revolutionary bouncing bomb, codenamed ‘Upkeep’. From their quarters at Scampton, the crews practiced low-level flying over reservoirs in the Peak District and Lincolnshire.
On the night of 16-17 May 1943, nineteen Lancasters of 617 Squadron took off from Scampton's runway for Operation CHASTISE. The story is one of the great epics of the Second World War: the incredible bravery of the crews flying at just 60 feet above the water in the face of intense anti-aircraft fire; the successful breaching of the Möhne and Eder dams; and the devastating floods that followed. But the cost was immense. Of the 133 airmen who left Scampton that night, 53 were killed. Eight aircraft and their crews did not return. Guy Gibson, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his leadership, would himself be killed in action later in the war. Scampton became a place of both triumph and profound loss, a key site in Britain’s national memory of the war, its soil sanctified by the sacrifice of the Dambusters.
The Cold War’s Concrete Scar: The V-Bombers and Glebe Farm
After the war, Scampton’s role evolved with the new geopolitical reality. The enemy was no longer Germany, but the Soviet Union, and the weapon was no longer the conventional blockbuster, but the atomic bomb. In the early 1950s, Britain developed its own independent nuclear deterrent, the V-Force, a trio of futuristic jet-powered bombers: the Vickers Valiant, the Handley Page Victor, and the Avro Vulcan.
These aircraft were vastly heavier, faster, and more powerful than the wartime Lancaster. They required longer, stronger runways to get airborne with their nuclear payloads. Scampton’s existing runways, sufficient for a Lancaster, were wholly inadequate. In 1954, a colossal engineering project began to prepare the base for the nuclear age. The main runway was to be extended from 6,000 feet to a massive 9,000 feet (2,740 metres).
This is where the ancient landscape faced its most brutal alteration. The planned runway extension lay directly across the path of Ermine Street, the A15. There was no question of compromise. The needs of national defence were absolute. The Ministry of Transport authorised the closure and diversion of a two-mile stretch of the historic Roman road. A new bypass was constructed, swinging eastwards around the airfield’s new perimeter, forming the curve that exists today. The old road, which had carried Roman legions, medieval pilgrims, and 18th-century mail coaches, was simply erased, its path disappearing under thousands of tons of concrete.
The expansion also required the compulsory purchase of 250 acres of surrounding agricultural land. This included fields that were part of Glebe Farm, the historic endowment of land belonging to St John the Baptist’s Church in Scampton. The irony was stark: land set aside for centuries to support the spiritual life of the parish was now being consumed to prepare for the possibility of Armageddon. The modern state, for the ultimate reason of war, was re-appropriating and reshaping a landscape whose deeds and ownership were recorded in Domesday, just as the Conqueror had done, but with incomparably more powerful tools. The sound of bulldozers and concrete mixers replaced the roar of Merlin engines, scarring the land in a way no transient army ever could. When the work was complete in 1956, RAF Scampton had been reborn: a state-of-the-art V-bomber base, its huge runway a permanent and dramatic feature of the local topography, a concrete testament to the fearful logic of the Cold War.
A Landscape of Memory
For the next decade, Scampton’s Vulcans stood on Quick Reaction Alert, ready to scramble in minutes to deliver nuclear retaliation. The base later became home to the world-famous Red Arrows aerobatic display team, their crimson Hawk jets a more benign symbol of air power than the white anti-flash painted bombers they replaced. In 2022, the Ministry of Defence confirmed the final closure of RAF Scampton as a flying station, bringing over a century of military aviation on the site to an end.
Today, the landscape north of Lincoln is a complex document of its own history. The diverted A15 tells the story of the Cold War. The giant runway, silent for now, speaks of the V-force and the Dambusters. The surviving hedgerows recall the enclosures of the 18th century. And buried beneath it all, bisected and overwritten, lies the ghost of Ermine Street, a memory of Roman imperium.
The story of Glebe Farm and the Scampton runway serves as a powerful local case study of a national truth. The English landscape, often idealised as a timeless, pastoral idyll, has always been a theatre of power, shaped and reshaped by the dominant forces of the age. From the Roman surveyor imposing an imperial grid, to the Norman baron parcelling out his spoils, to the Parliamentary commissioner drawing new lines on a map, the land has been subject to reconfiguration. The expansion of RAF Scampton in the 20th century was simply the latest, and perhaps most dramatic, chapter in this long story. It demonstrated how the abstract doctrines of aerial warfare and nuclear deterrence could manifest physically, carving new and indelible lines upon the ancient soil of the Brattleby barony, creating a landscape of memory where the shadow-sm of a Lancaster falls across a Roman road.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources: Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. Penguin Classics, 2003. Online extracts for Lincolnshire, including Brattleby (Brotelbi) and Scampton (Scantone), can be found at [Open Domesday](https://opendomesday.org/). * The National Archives, Kew: Records of the Air Ministry (AIR), Ministry of Defence (DEFE), and Ministry of Transport (MT) contain files relating to the expansion of RAF stations and the diversion of roads in the 1950s.
Secondary Sources (Academic & Specialist): Brickhill, Paul. The Dam Busters. Evans Brothers, 1951. (The classic contemporary account). Brooke-Carr, R. RAF Scampton: A History of the Airfield 1916-1992. Amadeus Press, 1992. Darby, H. C. The Domesday Geography of Eastern England. Cambridge University Press, 1971. Garrod, B. RAF Scampton: The Definitive History. The History Press, 2023. Hastings, Max. Bomber Command. Pan Macmillan, 1979. (Provides crucial context for Scampton's role in WWII). Holland, James. Dam Busters: The Race to Smash the Dams, 1943. Bantam Press, 2012. (A modern, detailed study). Margary, Ivan D. Roman Roads in Britain. John Baker, 1973. (The definitive survey of the Roman road network). Sawyer, Peter. The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings. Oxford University Press, 1997. (For context on the Danelaw). A History of the County of Lincoln: Volume 2 (Victoria County History). William Page (ed.), 1906. (Provides historical context for the region, although detailed parish histories for this area are limited in the older volumes). Wynn, Humphrey. The RAF Strategic Nuclear Deterrent Forces: Their Origins, Roles and Deployment 1946-1969*. HMSO, 1994. (The official history of the V-Force).