The airfield opened on 1 September 1940 - exactly a year after the war began - on land requisitioned from the Meyrick estate of Bodorgan, a large landholding in southwest Anglesey. It was first called RAF Aberffraw, after the nearest village. In May 1941 the name changed to RAF Bodorgan, matching the estate that hosted it. The accommodation in the early months was tents - canvas in an Anglesey winter is its own kind of war story - replaced over time by Nissen huts (the corrugated iron half-cylinders that became almost a visual shorthand for RAF outposts) and Maycrete huts for workshops and offices. The flying side had a single Blister hangar to start with, later joined by two Bellman hangars, sliding-door affairs designed to be erected quickly on austere fields.

Bodorgan's main job was anti-aircraft cooperation. The country's anti-aircraft gun batteries needed something to shoot at - or rather, something to track and practise on - and that was the role of the Anti-Aircraft Co-operation Units. Aircraft would fly predictable patterns over coastal ranges so gunners could calibrate their predictors, test their radar, and rehearse the drills of intercept. J Flight of No. 1 Anti-Aircraft Co-operation Unit was the first resident, arriving with the airfield in September 1940. Z Flight joined the next month. By November 1942 the unit numbering had been reorganised and Bodorgan was home to 1606 and 1620 Flights. Detachments from Nos. 6 and 8 AACU rotated through; No. 48 Maintenance Unit kept the airframes serviceable; No. 650 Squadron arrived in November 1944 for the last months of operations. It was thankless, important work, far from the headlines.

Flying ended on 30 September 1945, four weeks after the formal surrender of Japan. The hangars were dismantled soon after - their components valuable enough to be reused elsewhere on austerity Britain's airfields. Some of the Nissen and Maycrete huts were left in place, and a number remain on the site today, slowly returning to the landscape under brambles and farm use. The Meyrick estate carried on. Bodorgan Hall, the country house at the heart of the estate, is well known in another context: the Duke and Duchess of Sussex lived for a time in a property on the estate during Prince William's RAF SAR posting at RAF Valley, just up the coast. The airfield itself, though, has slipped back into being what it was before September 1940 - low fields between hedgerows, looking out toward Aberffraw Bay and the Irish Sea.

RAF Bodorgan is one of a constellation of small wartime fields - Mona, Caergeiliog, Penrhos, Llandwrog across the strait - that ringed the Anglesey coast during the war years. Some, like RAF Valley, survived to become major modern stations. Others, like Bodorgan, served their five years and faded. The island's geography made the case for them: low, flat, with reliable weather windows, good approaches over the sea, and reach to the Irish convoys and the western training areas. Whether the field has a runway you can land on today or only a few concrete strips embedded in pasture, every one of them is a small physical memory of how completely the war reorganised this coast.