A hot, crackly, static energy exudes from the high plateau. Desiccated gorse pods, which dry quicker on their sunward sides, twist then burst at the seams with an audible click; flinging seeds like a protest of missiles at our passing. Otherwise, all is peace. Rooks and jackdaws walk among patches of viper’s bugloss on the sunset-coloured gravels, bills open, panting.

Greenham Common is a place of big skies and wide, cloud-reflecting pools; a thousand acres of open heath on a gravel table, with wet, wooded, summer-dark gullies folding away like creases in a tablecloth. To William Cobbett on one of his “rural rides” in 1830, this lonely vista was “a villainous tract of rascally heath”. It has long been contested ground.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bunker built to hold nuclear warheads now lies open to the elements. Photograph: George Impey/Alamy Stock Photo

Disused cold war structures remind visitors of a recent past, when the common was fenced off to expand a strategic military airbase. Some of the patch-repaired fences remain in place, testament to the tenacity of wire-cutters in women’s hands. The bunkers, built to hold 96 nuclear warheads (plus four spares) as well as withstand a strike from one, have become part of the narrative-landscape of this place. Steep-sided, flat-roofed, grassed all over, their wide doorways are permanently vulnerable and open in surprise. Out near the rusting fireplane, a simulacrum used for training, whitethroats, goldfinches and linnets flock in loose family groups, relinquishing song for chinking and chipping contact calls, and freeing thistledown parachutes to float on the breeze. Stonechats perch on the gorse tops.

The view from the new visitors’ centre in the former control tower is an oceanic roll of Watership Down, Ladle Hill, Great Litchfield Down and Beacon Hill. This too is a contested area, where the recreation of visitors must be finely balanced with the conservation of rare birds.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The former control tower, now a visitors’ centre, at Greenham Common. Photograph: Gillian Pullinger/Alamy Stock Photo

The joyful sense of freedom we felt 19 years ago, when the fences came down and the airfield was returned as common land, still emanates from the place like a heat wobble on the horizon.

A green woodpecker rolls and dips through the lower air, a paper plane folded from a page of a colour supplement. He seems to laugh at his own languorous origami flight down the old runway.