There are some postings you forget almost as soon as you leave them. RAF Cowden was not one of them.

I was posted there from 1986 to 1988, and looking back now it was one of the strangest, most enjoyable and most memorable places I ever served. It was not a big station with endless people, parades and fuss. In truth, it was a very small camp, tucked away in pleasant farmland, with the beach only about a mile away and the North Sea always making its presence felt.

What made Cowden unusual was the contrast. On the one hand, it was one of the best places I ever stayed. The domestic block was purpose-built, a two-storey L-shaped building with the upper floor more dormer than full storey. We had single rooms, which was a rarity in those days. The food was second to none, mainly because the chef was only really cooking for four of us who lived in. We even had our own bar, which we ran ourselves. With office staff and civilian workers maintaining the targets, there were about sixteen people on the camp altogether, but only four of us actually lived there. That gave the place a very close-knit feel. Small enough that everyone knew everyone, and comfortable enough that you could forget for a moment what sort of place it really was.

Because Cowden was not just a pleasant little camp near the coast. It was a busy working air weapons range.

In the late 1980s the main traffic was Tornado GR1s, F-111s and A-10s. We had the occasional Jaguar and Harrier, but the USAF was really our meat and potatoes. They were not based on site, but they were the backbone of much of the flying we saw. Every now and then the USAF would send a pilot up to see us and go through the scoring. Curiously enough, they always seemed to have done rather well when they came back to look at the results.

Bomb scoring was a serious business. It was done by triangulation using scopes, intercom and a computer. The basic maths behind it was not especially complicated, a bit of Pythagoras and a database to hold the results, but in practice it had to work properly when things got busy. I ended up developing changes to the computer to make it more usable in heavy periods, and I was later seconded to Strike Command to help with development work on a new version of the system. In the end, I never saw that come to fruition, which is probably a fairly familiar story to anyone who has ever tried to improve anything in a large organisation. Still, for a while at least, it felt good to be helping make the system better. At the end of each week the results were sent out to the various squadrons, so what we did on that little camp mattered.

The range itself is still very clear in my mind. Target 7 was the furthest out to sea, around a mile and a half, a metallic raft about thirty feet square, mainly used by F-111s and Tornados. Target 6 was much closer in, about a quarter of a mile offshore, and was a circle of barrels with a small raft in the middle, though it was not used very often. Target 3 sat to the left of the tower, a circle of barrels with a cluster in the middle. Target 4 was to the right of the tower, built much the same way, and was mainly used by A-10s. Then there were the strafe pits, to the left of Target 4 and nearest the tower, also mainly used by A-10s.

And that brings me to the tower.

The tower was not somewhere you relaxed. It had a radio room and a toilet at the bottom, stairs up to the control room at the top, and a balcony running around it. From up there the view was magnificent. Straight out to sea, with Flamborough Head to the left and the Humber estuary to the right. On a clear day it was a lovely place to look out from. But it also had an edge to it that you did not forget. The tower was close to the strafe pits, about 250 metres away, and you could regularly hear ricochets flying past. That certainly sharpened the senses. It was also vulnerable in another way. The tower stood about 300 feet from the cliff edge, and one morning we came in to find that roughly 150 feet of cliff had disappeared overnight. That gives you a fair idea of what the Holderness coast was like. Beautiful to look at, but always on the move and always taking bites out of the land.

If there had been a fire in the tower, the evacuation plan was not exactly luxurious either. You got out by jumping off the balcony wearing a rope harness that slowed your fall. Perfectly sensible in a practical RAF sort of way, but it sounds mad when you say it out loud now.

The weather was usually standard British weather, nothing especially dramatic most of the time, but every so often we would get sea fog. When it came in, it really came in. One summer it stayed for two weeks. We could not see a thing, while the aircraft could apparently see everything, which used to cause no end of frustration. Cowden could do that to you. One minute it was all calm skies and open sea views, the next minute the place felt like it had disappeared into a wet white blanket.

Like anywhere, there were local characters too. We had a regular complainer, Mr Bentley of Cowden Parva Farm, who seemed to object to just about everything and was certainly no fan of the USAF. He became part of the background music of the place. Every posting seems to have somebody like that.

What I remember most now is not one single dramatic day. It is the overall feel of it. A tiny camp. Good food. Single rooms. Our own little bar. A handful of people keeping the place going. Civilian staff on the scopes and maintaining the targets, RAF air traffic control in the tower, and aircraft coming through in bursts of noise and energy before heading back out of sight. It was comfortable, but it was never soft. The tower could be nerve-racking. The sea could take half the cliff in a night. The range work had to be right. And despite the small size of the place, what we did fed directly back to front-line squadrons.

Cowden was a place of odd contrasts. It was peaceful and dangerous, comfortable and exposed, beautiful and unforgiving. One moment you could be enjoying one of the best mess meals of your service life, and the next you could be in a tower listening to rounds crack past or staring at a cliff edge that had moved alarmingly closer since yesterday.

I have been posted to bigger places, busier places and more important places on paper, but Cowden has stayed with me in a way many of them have not. Perhaps that is because it felt real. No pretence, no grandeur, just a small group of people doing an unusual job in a remarkable place.

For all its oddities, I remember it very fondly.

RAF Cowden was one of a kind.