The range was not originally British. In 1933, the Wehrmacht began using the heaths east of Nordhorn for artillery target practice - the first formal military use of this stretch of moor. Twelve years later, in 1945, the property changed hands rather decisively, and the Royal Air Force inherited a working range from a defeated army. The transition was not quiet. In April 1945, in the final weeks of the war in Europe, several Polish units operating under RAF command made short stays at Nordhorn: No. 302 Polish Fighter Squadron, No. 308, and No. 317, along with No. 662 Squadron RAF. The First Polish Fighter Wing - No. 131 Wing RAF - was also briefly resident. They were among the first crews to use a German training range for Allied purposes, while the war they had been fighting for years was still ending.

Through the long decades of the Cold War, RAF Nordhorn became one of the busiest air-to-ground ranges in northern Europe, integrated into RAF Germany. Pilots flew in from British bases scattered across northern West Germany - and from NATO partners further afield - to practise the dive-attacks, low-level passes, and weapons deliveries that NATO doctrine called for. Above the town, the noise rolled in waves. The aircraft did not bomb Nordhorn; the targets sat well east, on the heath, where blast shelters and observation towers and the kind of weathered concrete you find on every active range stood out from the moor. But the Vechte valley funnelled the sound back, and so the townspeople heard, day after day, the air force of an ally training to fight an enemy they themselves had little direct quarrel with.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, much of the British military presence in Germany began to unwind. RAF stations across the British Army of the Rhine area closed or transferred. Nordhorn did not. It remained one of the few facilities the British armed forces kept in Germany, valuable enough that the Ministry of Defence decided in 1996 to actually expand the aerodrome rather than wind it down. That same year, however, the longer plan was announced: control of the range would be handed to the German government within a decade. The transfer duly took place in March 2001, and the Royal Air Force left the site after fifty-six years of operations. The range did not close. It simply continued under the Bundeswehr - still active, still used by NATO partners, still echoing across the heath.

What strikes anyone who looks at Nordhorn now is how naturally a small, prosperous border town has absorbed all this. The bombing range is a fixture, controversial but accepted, a piece of municipal furniture that came with the postwar political settlement and never quite went away. For the residents who grew up under the daily flights, it is harder to disentangle. The sound used to mean Britain was here, that NATO was watching the East, that the world was a tense and structured place. Now, when a Eurofighter or Tornado of the Luftwaffe peels off above the moor, the sound means something different - a continuation, a habit, a small inheritance from a long and very strange century. The aircraft change. The heath does not.