A sheep, a stopwatch, and a world championship
Silverstone Circuit began as RAF Silverstone, a wartime bomber station, whose disused runways were driven over by a group of local racers in 1947 in a joyride remembered as the Mutton Grand Prix, after a sheep was killed on the track. By 1948 the Royal Automobile Club had leased the ground formally, and by 1950 it hosted the first race of the World Championship of Drivers.
A sheep died on the runway during an unofficial race
Maurice Geoghegan lived in Silverstone village. He knew the wartime airfield nearby stood empty. The runways had gone quiet the year before. The RAF training squadron based here had moved out. Geoghegan gathered eleven other drivers. They laid out a rough two-mile course over the old tarmac.
There was no safety fence and no marshal, just hay bales and nerve. Partway through the race a sheep wandered onto the runway. Geoghegan hit it at racing speed. The sheep died. His car was wrecked. The story stuck to the event ever after. Locals started calling it the Mutton Grand Prix.
It was reckless and half-organized. It was also proof the ground still worked as a racetrack. Within a year the Royal Automobile Club noticed.
The airfield hosted the first World Championship race
The Royal Automobile Club took a formal lease on the derelict station in 1948. Engineers marked out a circuit using the original runways. They joined them with hairpins. The track edges were still just hay bales. The first races ran straight down the old bomber approaches.
A year later the club switched the layout. They used the airfield's perimeter road instead of the runways. That perimeter track hosted the 1950 British Grand Prix. This was the first race of the brand-new World Championship of Drivers. Geoghegan had raced across these runways three years before.
Mansell gave a stranded rival a lift to the pits
Silverstone stayed rough and fast for decades. Most corners were taken flat in fourth or fifth gear. That changed between 1990 and 1991. The whole layout was rebuilt. It became tighter and more technical.
Nigel Mansell won the first Grand Prix run on the new track. He raced in front of his home crowd. On the slowdown lap he spotted a rival stranded at the roadside. Ayrton Senna's McLaren had run dry on the final lap. Mansell stopped. He gave Senna a lift back to the pits. Senna sat balanced on the car's side-pod. This became one of the most replayed images in the sport's history. It happened on ground that started as a place to train bomber crews. That same ground once hosted a race past a dead sheep.
## A village emptied for sheep pasture
A village was cleared away to make room for pasture
Before this ground held any airfield, another landowner cleared out an entire community a few miles off. Thomas Dayrell held the manor at Lillingstone Dayrell. In 1493 he evacuated the village that stood there and turned the open land to pasture.
Houses came down. Families left. Only the church of St Nicholas stayed standing, alone in the fields where the streets used to run. Hollow ways still cut across the ploughed ground, and pottery pieces still turn up in the soil.
Nobody rebuilt the streets Dayrell emptied. The land went quiet. It stayed that way for centuries. Later the airfield would sit just as quiet, until Geoghegan's friends broke it with engines.
## Monks buried face down in plague pits
Monks near the abbey were buried face down as plague victims
A mile south of the old bomber station, Benedictine monks tried to hold their own ground. They failed. Luffield Abbey was founded around 1124 by Robert de Beaumont. Its monks worked the land for almost 370 years.
Poverty closed the priory in 1494. This was one year after Lillingstone Dayrell's village was cleared. The buildings fell in. The site went back to farmland and stayed forgotten for centuries.
In the 1970s, diggers found out what had happened to the monks who died there. Their remains had been buried face down. Plague victims were buried this way. The priory had emptied out like the fields around it. People gone. Ground left for someone else to use.
## A knight and his wife left behind in stone
A knight and his wife were left in brass and stone
Inside the church at Lillingstone Dayrell stands a brass altar tomb. Paul Dayrell and his wife Margaret lie in it. Paul died in 1491. He was carved in full plate armor with his feet resting on a lion. Margaret lies beside him.
Two years after they were buried, Thomas Dayrell emptied the village around their tomb. The houses came down and the fields went to pasture. But the church stayed. So did the couple inside it.
Their monument is close to the only solid trace left of the community that used to surround it. Everything else is bumps in a field and shapes under grass. They wait for whoever next decided what the ground was for.
The runways are gone under grandstands now, but the ground still belongs to whoever gets to it first.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.
