Ground control
It beamed Britain into the satellite age and could soon be mission control for deep space explorers. Goonhilly, we have touchdown.
YOU’VE HEARD OF Cape Canaveral. You probably know of Houston too; husky-voiced Texans nicknamed it Space City in the sixties, when NASA’s Mission Control relocated there. But what about Goonhilly?
It might sound like a whimsical village in Tolkien’s Shire, or possibly something hummocky relating to a famous comic act, but it’s actually a ragged tract of open heathland on Cornwall’s Lizard. Mainland Britain’s southernmost peninsula probably isn’t the first place that rockets to mind when we think of the Space Age, yet back in 1962 Goonhilly Downs were the heather-draped stage for a telecoms first – all thanks to 1118 tonnes of concrete and steel called Arthur.
‘TV from space’ trumpeted the Pathé newsreel at the time, when Arthur – the world’s first parabolic antenna (a giant satellite dish to you and us) – picked up a signal from America, bounced off the Telstar satellite. Seven years later he would relay live images of Neil Armstrong’s ‘one small step’ from the Apollo 11 Command Module to our screens. Now Grade II listed, Arthur (officially ‘Antenna 1’) was the first in a flock of metal mushrooms erected by the Post Office (later British Telecom) at what became the Goonhilly Earth Station, at one time the largest satellite receiving station on the planet. Uther and Guinevere were next to grace the Cornish skyline, followed by Lancelot and Geraint, continuing a streak of Arthurian names.
A dense bedrock called serpentinite provides a raised and stable foundation for Goonhilly’s enormous antennas – the largest being Merlin, 32 metres in diameter. Until 2008, when BT closed the site and moved operations to the Madley Communications Centre in Herefordshire, over 25 dishes were transmitting and receiving TV signals, fax messages and 10 million telephone calls every week. Today they’re being recalibrated for radio astronomy, satellite services and deep space communications. Anyone launching a space probe to the edges of the solar system in the next few decades will be able to communicate with it from Goonhilly’s mission control centre. It’s being called the UK’s ‘gateway to space’ (see goonhilly.org).
Telecoms engineers weren’t the first people drawn to the remote and scrubby high ground of Goonhilly Downs however. Dwarfed by the dishes there’s a scattering of Bronze Age burial barrows, trackways and a standing stone known as the Dry Tree menhir among the ruins of a wartime radar station – perhaps an early attempt at a celestial uplink. It all makes for an otherworldly walk.
WALK HERE: There’s a step-by-step guide to a 3-mile circular trail around Goonhilly Downs from the national nature reserve car park on the Lizard Countryside Partnership website: www.bit.ly/goonhillydowns-walk