METHERINGHAM Airfield Visitor Centre may be a small affair but it’s big on wartime history. It’s heart is a little museum in a hut which was once one of the airfield’s rations stores.

A few yards away, there is a building which used to double up as the base gymnasium and chapel. Now it is used for wartime theme dances, wartime lectures and reunions and houses what was once the world’s largest working scale model of an aircraft - a Lancaster of course. Two minutes drive from here are the remnants of the perimeter track and runways.

The airfield was home to the winner of one of the most breathtaking VCs of the war

This is all that is left of what was once an airfield bustling with 2,500 men and women. Here, as in all the scattered remnants of Bomber County, there are memories, glory, triumphs, tragedies, loss – still steeped in the soil 60 years on.

One of its many brave souls was Flight Engineer Norman Jackson - a man who would climb onto the wing of a Lancaster over Germany one night to put a fire out in one of the engines while it was being attacked by an ME110. He won himself and Metheringham a VC.

The airfield's other claim to fame was to be one of only 16 FIDO airfields in Britain – a Fog Investigation And Dispersal Operation that involved pumping thousands of gallons of petrol down two pipleines situated along both sides of the runway and setting light to it so it could be seen from miles away.

Then there are the secret hangars - a secret still not uncovered to this day. Metheringham's history is still very much alive.