RAF Vickers Wellington, Ben Tirran, crash date 09/10/42


[Picture from wikipedia.org]

OS 10-figure grid refs (GPS):

NO 38098 76044
NO 38275 76102

 Google Maps display showing wreckage locations

This site lies at an altitude of about 780m, 2 km north-east of the summit of Ben Tirran in Glen Clova. There are significant remains at the site, including the two engines, and large parts of the fuselage and wings (showing the Wellington's geodetic construction very well). This site is relatively unknown, and does not even appear in the usually authoritative HGWR.

There are some pictures of the site on the TFDACSS website, and there is quite a lot of information about this crash on the ACSS site.

I also discovered a second large piece of wreckage, about 200m to the east of the main debris pile which seems to be little known about and which I have not seen any photographs of before (last two pictures in the set). This looks like the entire tailplane section of the Wellington. A picture of the wreck site on the ACSS website taken not long after the crash seems to show this tailplane section with the rest of the wreckage, and the TFDACSS website states 'This site originally boasted a completely intacted tail section however this was removed a few years ago by an aircraft museum in England unfortunately', so there's a bit of a mystery here.

Another mystery is that this tailplane section and the setting look extremely similar to the cover photo used on HGWR, which is labelled as the wreck of a Wellington from 20 OTU in the Scottish Highlands - despite not appearing in the book! This appears to be a deliberate omission by the author of HGWR to keep the site anonymous.

There are also some photographs of the site on this website:

http://www.pbase.com/markymc/high_ground_wrecks_in_scotland

These pictures were taken in March 2009.