Admit it: If you bought a chocolate box cottage in the country after a 25-year search, you’d be pretty teed off if a giant golf ball landed a few yards from the garden.

But that’s exactly the scenario an East Hampshire family faced 40 years ago when the Ministry of Defence built this “space age monster” close to Oakhanger.

And to make this space age tale even sadder – the Watters family knew nothing about the development, or could do anything about it. If you’re going to pick a planning battle, your chances are slim against the Ministry of Defence.

A little birdie picked out this story from a September 1985 edition of the East Hampshire Post of the military satellite installation taking shape over the £100,000 home.

The Watters family moved into the picturesque 400-year-old Tudor thatch cottage the spring before, describing the cottage as their dream home.

And although the buyers were aware of the military site next door, SGS Oakhanger wasn’t the development we know today. There was certainly no way of knowing the MOD pinpointed the facility off Oakhanger Road as the ideal site for its Radome tracking station.

The man of the house, Alex Watters, called it an eyesore but accepted there was nothing he could do, as the MOD did not need council planning permission at the time to build any structure.

He said: “When we bought the house there was a dish behind the house and we thought nothing of it.

“But the situation was that once they put the dish up they could do what they like and put anything they wanted around it.”

Strangely, other Oakhanger residents kept quiet, with EHDC’s Eddie Lucas calling the local response “reasonably peaceful”.

The councillor said: “A lot of people like the look of it more than the white disks.”