Plans to turn World War Two air base into holiday home take off

That could become a reality if new plans get their way in Co Down, where moves have begun to turn a disused Royal Air Force control tower into private accommodation.

According to newly filed planning documents, the project would create a “two-bed self-catering holiday let”, along with a new detached domestic garage plus landscaping and car parking spaces.

The site is the former RAF Bishops Court, located in countryside around six miles outside of Downpatrick and close to the southeast coast of Co Down.

Created in 1943, after the conflict ended in Allied victory it functioned intermittently as a working air base before becoming a radar station during the Cold War.

In that capacity it scanned the Atlantic for military craft, but was also used for civilian air traffic control.

It was recently on the market with offers starting at £80,000, estate agents Carolyn Edgar Homes describing the property as “a perfect opportunity to create something truly special in a picturesque setting”.

The full site attached to the tower stretches to almost half an acre. It’s mostly grass, looking not unlike farmland, with the former RAF building in one corner of it.

So far the plans are still at an nearly stage and few details are available. Publicly published documents reveal, however, that the application is being made by someone with an address in Wiltshire, using Belfast-based consultants CMP Planning and Design as agents.

The site was in the hands of the RAF for around 50 years. Although built to serve as a combat crew replacement centre for the US air force, during the Second World War it was primarily used as a training hub for British airmen.

The facility nevertheless played host to a major American wartime VIP, as General Dwight D Eisenhower landed at RAF Bishops Court in May 1944 when inspecting airfields.

For a couple of years after the war it was used by the RAF for navigation training, but appears to have been shuttered for a while before reopening in the early 1950s as a radar station. One of four reporting stations scanning the North Atlantic, it was known as ‘Ulster Radar’.

Its non-military use was highlighted in the 1961 Pathé newsreel ‘It’s Safer By Air Now’, in which the station was stated to have a range of 180 miles away and up to 40,000 feet up. Both the RAF and civilians worked there, tracking aircraft all over the UK’s skies.

In the late 1970s air traffic control was relocated from Bishops Court to Scotland, though the RAF stayed and once again used it for training.

Towards the end of the 1980s the air force decided to sell it. In September 1989, the base was attacked by the IRA who fired five mortars and caused property damage but no serious injuries.

Since the RAF put Bishops Court on the market in the early 1990s, parts of its crew quarters have become housing.

When the property was recently for sale, Carolyn Edgar Homes stated anyone who wound up buying it would “have the freedom to design and build [their] dream home” in what the estate agents described as an “idyllic location surrounded by green fields with breath-taking views, creating both a peaceful and tranquil environment”.