The work we do at the radar station on Titterstone Clee is a lot less glamorous than you’d think. We send a radar picture of all aircraft flying within about 100 miles of here to air traffic control centres. Controllers can then communicate with the aircraft remotely using our radio masts – the ones here on Titterstone to speak to the aircraft and the ones on Brown Clee to get messages back.
We are quite passive here. The information all goes one way – from us to air traffic control. We don’t even know who uses the information we send. We never get any feedback.
We simply maintain the site. General wear and tear, power cuts, that sort of thing. But as the equipment becomes more reliable, there is less to do. There used to be about two dozen people working here, now we just have half a dozen. I’m sure it’s going the way of lighthouses. In time this place won’t be manned permanently. I’ll still be fixing it – but I’ll be driving from one station to
another.
I love it up here especially in the winter; the way the ice forms on the fences. It’s so raw. The temperature quite often drops to minus 10°C. With the high winds, it never snows downwards, it always snows across.
The atmosphere of the place is quite humbling. From up here you have got such a vast view of the countryside, it makes you aware how small you are. But it makes you feel a bit more alive.
The light is always changing – there is always something going on in the weather. You see little micro-climates, bands of rain moving across, or thunder and lightning somewhere in the distance. You also see a lot of wildlife. Sparrow hawks and kestrels hover at about the level of our windows, even though they are actually quite high off the ground.
With our bird’s-eye view we can see people riding across the common, or walking on the hill. Occasionally people come up and ask if they can paraglide off the top. There are also parties of schoolchildren, perhaps on field trips. It always seems to be raining when they come and you see them standing around huddled up in their little cagoules.
We also get the joy-riders, who come up at night to dump their cars and set them on fire. People always say it’s kids from Birmingham but no one really knows. I guess word gets around that it’s the kind of place you can wreck a car and not get disturbed.
We don’t really have any dealings with the other people who use the hill, like the farmers. We have our compound and that’s it. Sometimes the sheep get locked inside for a few hours. It’s quite useful, they keep the grass short. The farmers never seem to want to come up and reclaim them. But the sheep are smart, they just walk across the cattle grids. They always get out eventually.
There has been so much land-use here over the centuries, with things always changing and going out of use. The radar station itself has been on this site since 1963 and it is constantly evolving. Eventually it will become derelict and people will come up here and wonder what the buildings were all used for.