Caldale
CALDALE: Airship and Balloon Station
Note: In September 2020 Mr Michael T Holder very kindly offered these maps and pictures.
Note: This picture was obtained from Google Earth ©
As so often I have the Airfields of Britain Conservation Trust helping me to pinpoint this location.
Military users: RNAS/RAF Class B Airship Station and Kite Balloon Base
Location: Probably S of Caldale (?) on a minor road roughly 2nm W of Kirkwall
Period of operation: 1916 to 1919
Site area: 146 acres
NOTES: Mike Holder also kindly provided this information: "In World War 1 air operations conducted by the Royal Navy in and around Orkney led to the creation in 1916-17 of an airfield, an airship station, a kite balloon station and four bases for seaplanes which patrolled the Fair Isle Channel hunting for enemy submarines."
My note: It might be wondered today. for younger readers especially, why Scapa Flow should have been such a major base for the Royal Navy. The answer being that it was the nearest safe haven to the major German Navy bases, on the northern shores of Germany, to the east. Therefore the preferred route to the Atlantic and indeed, the rest of the world.
It is probably worth mentioning that at the end of WW1 most of the captured German Navy vessels, from battleships down, were brought across to Scapa Flow and scuttled. It is no coincidence that soon after WW2 was declared, a most daring raid by a German submarine was made on Scapa Flow and the battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk with a huge loss of life on the 14th October 1939. Pay back time!
"The airship station was established in a relatively sheltered site at Caldale, west of Kirkwall, but the two large hangars, designed to house and maintain rigid airships, were used mainly for the maintenance and inflation of kite balloons in support of the operational base at Houton on the northern shore of Scapa Flow. Kite balloons were a hazardous means of aerial reconnaissance: the observers stood in open baskets hung beneath the balloons which, secured to cruisers with long hawsers or cables, were towed kite-like, at heights of between 500 and 1,000 feet (150 to 300 metres)."
"The concrete blocks visible in the Google Earth © picture were surmounted by rails on which wheeled screens ran down the sides of the former airship hangars. The purpose of the large, mobile deflector screens which flanked the hangars was to steady the airships or balloons from cross-winds on entering or leaving the sheds."
My note: The term 'hangar' was a French word intended to describe large spacious buildings designed specifically for aviation use. This term was then gradually adopted by the British during WW1. Up to that point the British used the term 'shed', which of course was pretty much meaningless, being applied to any size of temporary structures from typically tiny units in back gardens to those large enough to house airships.
"The area originally occupied by the hangars, was altered and overlaid in WW2 when the site served as a depot for the Royal Mechanical and Electrical Engineers (REME)."
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