RAF Portreath

RRH Portreath
RAF Portreath
near Portreath, Cornwall, England
Aerial photograph of Portreath airfield looking north, the technical sites and barrack sites are at the bottom, 9 March 1944
RRH Portreath
Coordinates	50°16′17″N 005°15′48″W / 50.27139°N 5.26333°W / 50.27139; -5.26333
Type	Radar station
Site information
Open to the public	No
Site history
Built	1980 (1980)
In use	1980 – present

RRH Portreath is a Remote Radar Head operated by the Royal Air Force. It is situated at Nancekuke Common on the clifftops to the north of Portreath beach and southwest of Porthtowan in Cornwall. Its radar (housed in a fibre glass or golf ball protective dome) provides long-range coverage of the south western approaches to the UK.

Called RAF Portreath, the base was built during 1940, opened in March 1941 and had a varied career during the Second World War, initially as a RAF Fighter Command station, from October 1941 as a ferry stop-over for aircraft bound to/from North Africa and the Middle East, as a temporary stop-over for USAAF and RCAF units, and then as a Coastal Command station. By the end of the war, it had run down and in May 1950 was handed back to the government by the RAF.

The base reverted to its local name Nancekuke and became an outstation of Chemical Defence Establishment (CDE) Porton Down. Manufacture of the nerve agent Sarin in a pilot production facility commenced there in the early 1950s, producing about 20 tons of the nerve agent from 1954 until 1956. Nancekuke became an important factory for stockpiling the UK's Chemical Defences during the Cold War. Periodically, small amounts of VX were also produced at Nancekuke. Production of VX agent was intended mainly for laboratory test purposes, but also to validate plant designs and optimise chemical processes for potential mass-production. However, full-scale mass-production of VX agent never took place. In the late 1950s, the chemical weapons production plant at Nancekuke was mothballed, but was maintained through the 1960s and 1970s in a state whereby production of chemical weapons could easily re-commence if required.