Full WW2 control tower details and photos for this wartime airfield are coming soon. Please check back later as this is work progress. If you would like to contribute information or photos please get in touch.
RAF Cark, on the Cartmel Peninsula near Cark and Flookburgh (now in Cumbria, historically Lancashire), was built in 1941 as the RAF expanded both air defence and training capacity in the north-west. The station was originally conceived as a fighter airfield under No. 9 Group, Fighter Command, intended to help protect industrial areas and shipping routes around the Irish Sea and north-west England. Its wartime story, however, soon became dominated by training and specialist support.
The airfield layout reflected its initial fighter purpose: dispersal pens, a technical site with a Bellman hangar, and additional blister hangars to handle aircraft in quantity. In March 1942 RAF Cark was taken over by RAF Flying Training Command, and the Staff Pilot Training Unit was formed under No. 25 Group. The job of this unit was to produce pilots capable of instructional duties – an essential requirement as the RAF’s training system expanded at speed. This demanded a high standard of flying, including day and night work, and a level of competence that went beyond simple ‘learning to fly’.
Aircraft types at Cark underlined the station’s training identity. Hurricanes, Miles Martinets and later Spitfires were used alongside Avro Ansons and a Tiger Moth employed for communications. For trainees and instructors, exposure to higher-performance aircraft was valuable: it built confidence, improved handling skills, and prepared pilots for the realities of fighter and co-operation work. The station also supported anti-aircraft gunnery co-operation, hosting units and flights that worked with ground gunners by towing targets or providing co-operation sorties. Detachments from units such as No. 289 Squadron (with Hurricanes) and later visiting Spitfires emphasise this role.
RAF Cark’s wartime life therefore combined two linked functions: training the people who would teach others, and supporting the gunnery and anti-aircraft training that helped defend Britain and improve operational effectiveness. Stations like Cark were not glamorous, but they were indispensable. They reduced the pressure on operational airfields by handling training tasks and ensured that the RAF’s enormous wartime expansion did not collapse under a lack of qualified instructors.
Later in the war and immediately afterwards, gliding became part of the airfield’s identity. Gliders from a requisitioned club were moved in and formed No. 188 Gliding School under the Air Training Corps. This extended the training theme beyond wartime necessity into the RAF’s broader youth aviation culture, showing how airfields could transition from intensive wartime roles into peacetime training and recreation.
Operations at Cark were run down after 1945, with the station placed on care and maintenance. The final resident units departed in the post-war period and the airfield closed, later finding new civilian aviation uses including parachuting. RAF Cark’s Second World War story is therefore one of adaptation: planned as a fighter base, reshaped into a training and gunnery-support station, and ultimately leaving a legacy rooted in the production of skills and the support of Britain’s wider air defence system.