RAF Ballywalter

RAF Ballywalter lay on the Ards Peninsula in County Down, Northern Ireland, on the demesne of Ballywalter Park, the seat of Lord Dunleath. Rather than a conventional operational aerodrome, it served as No. 16 Satellite Landing Ground, a dispersed storage site controlled by No. 23 Maintenance Unit based at RAF Aldergrove. The ground was prepared during the early months of 1941, and the first proving flight was made by an Avro Anson on 25 April 1941.

The site’s purpose was concealment and overspill storage rather than flying operations. Completed and reserve aircraft were dispersed across the estate and tucked beneath the trees of the surrounding Dunleath parkland, where they were hidden from aerial reconnaissance until needed. Ballywalter Park also functioned as an RAF repair base, and aircraft were brought in and out by air; training and test flights ranged over nearby Strangford Lough, and spent cartridge cases from this gunnery practice have since been recovered along its shoreline.

With Northern Ireland’s air defence concentrated on the larger fighter station at Ballyhalbert and on Belfast’s sector controls, Ballywalter remained a quiet support facility throughout the war. After 1945 the landing ground was given up and the parkland returned to the Dunleath estate; only limited traces of its wartime use survive today.