The “real” Spitfire PT462 was built in 1943 and delivered to 215 Maintenance Unit in Dumfries, from where it was transported to Europe on board the Silver Sandal, seeing service with the Mediterranean Allied Air Force before being returned to the RAF in January 1945.

After a long career, the derelict airframe of PT462 was discovered in Israel in 1976. Shortly afterwards it was recovered from a municipal rubbish dump and taken to a storage facility in Cambridge ahead of a restoration project which saw it put back into flying condition.

The aircraft was taken to Florida in 1994, and two years later it was flown by Dr Hamish MacLeod from Moffat, who was in the state to complete a night flying and instrument rating refresher course.

Dr MacLeod had been a trained RAF Volunteer Reserve pilot with the Edinburgh University Air Squadron from 1959 to 1962 and was so taken by his encounter with PT462 that he commissioned a replica of the fighter as it had been in 1943.

In 2009 the replica arrived in pieces and was painstakingly put together by Dr MacLeod over a three-week period. It now sits proudly in his garden, where it is admired by local people and tourists alike.

Dr MacLeod had moved to Moffat in 1959 to take up the temporary position of science teacher at St Ninian’s and has now gifted the replica as the centrepiece of the Moffat Spitfire Project in the grounds of his former workplace. The “real” Spitfire PT462 has been converted into a two-seater version for carrying passengers.