Decoy site on Oswaldtwistle Moor

Army Bombing Decoy Site at Oswaldtwistle Moor

This is an Army Bombing Decoy Site (A Series) built in an attempt to protect the Royal Ordnance factory in Blackburn in 1941 during the German bombing campaign against Britain .
It was both a QF site and a QL site .
QF means it used small fires to indicate strikes from incendiary bombs in the hope of fooling the German airmen to drop their bombs on the moor . QF was useful against aircraft following the lead aircaft .
QL refers to the use of lighting to try and decieve the bombers . This would be used prior to bombs being dropped once the lead aircraft had dropped their load  more use of the QF would be made .

The shelter that remains has two areas within it . One large, one smaller with an escape hatch .  The smaller one probaly contained a generator for the lights and the escape hatch may have doubled as an observation point for the controlling crew to remotely fire the various devices of subterfuge  whilst remaining in a sort of safety ..... a sort of because a direct hit would no doubt kill all occupants therein .
It seems a dangerous job to invite aircraft to bomb your location .

view from the outside , with modern day wind turbines on the horizon

The ladder for the escape hatch can be seen along with an asbestos lined  vent and access for the generator

View toward the entrance of the Army decoy site shelter

This site was close by to a Permanent  Starfish (C series) site on Haslingden Moor .  SF35(a) was built to protect marshelling yards at Church (a nearby village) It was one of a series of 6 all located within a small radius and protecting vital areas  around the larger town of Accrington .
This was a Civil Bombing Decoy Site . The two sites were combined and run as one later in the war .

Nothing now remains of the Starfish site ...we took photos of the area and a few enigmatic red bricks which are atypically found at dismantled Starfish sites . 

Red bricks perhaps once of the command structure

The Army Bombing Decoy site has been wrongly attributed to being a dummy airfield decoy site  .
It is very definately an Army Bombing  Decoy site. Varified in Colin Dobinson's excellent book Fields of Deception produced by English Heritage .
Suprisingly EH website Pastscape does not have the ABD site on thier pages but does have the Starfish site which is  but a short distance away .