Orford Ness: gosh.

From the village of Orford, which stretches right down to the quay, the clustered military buildings on the other side of the River Ore seemed much closer than I had expected. How could it have been possible to keep the AWRE activities secret, especially given the far-reaching view from Orford’s medieval castle up on the hill? No wonder the locals have smothered the site in speculation for the past half-century. A quiet buzz of excitement filled our twelve-person boat on the first of day’s eight rides across to ‘the Island.’ The Trust’s booklet had primed us for “a landscape of unusual character with its sheer scale perhaps its most memorable feature” a landscape that “can be exposed, lonely, hostile and wild,” which held the promise of ornithological delights, and yet which housed all manner of military experiments, “some of which affected the course of world history” (16-7). In the flurry of local and national newspaper articles that appeared around the time of its opening to the public, Orford Ness was “weird, unsettling,” “sinister” (The Times 8/6/95; Guardian Weekend 24/6/95), and a place where “visitors will reflect on the incredible history of Orford Ness” and “will be fascinated but tantalised” by the sight of those AWRE laboratories nick-named the Pagodas (EADT 6/6/95). The site comes with high assurances and dramatic claims.

Before being released from the National Trust volunteers’ stewardship on stepping off the boat, we were told which birds we might see, where the trail marked out by the Trust would lead us and that we must not leave this trail. The first stretch of the path was banked high on the river side – flood protection – and opened out to marshland and the First World War airfield on the other. This bank cuts off the view back to the mainland, seeming to accentuate the effect of boat journey in transporting us to a different world entirely. We approached a cluster of low-lying, standardised, prefabricated buildings from the two world wars, mundane in appearance, but jostled by their incongruous companions: discarded, decaying metal and concrete structures.

Inside the buildings here on ‘The Street,’ museum displays ran through Orford Ness’ geomorphological and ornithological features, and the military uses of the site up until the early Cold War years. I found out that the shingle spit has been slowly growing southwards over the past five hundred years, obscuring more and more the once-thriving port of Orford. I found that the site has many different types of habitat – salt marsh, mudflats, brackish lagoons, reed beds, natural grassland and shingle – supporting many migratory birds from year to year. I saw a montage of aerial photographs of the site from the 1950s, learnt that during the First World War important early developments of aerial photography were made here, and felt the montage jumping backwards and forwards across that thirty-year gap as I watched. I read about the investigations into ballistics of bombs dropped from the Ness out towards the sea, about trials into self-sealing aeroplane fuselage tanks, about the simulated attacks on plane parts with various projectiles, and about the research and development of the aerial defence system which was to become known as radar. The site seemed to be a focal point for the country’s connectivity and mobility in war.

Back outside, walking away from The Street and over Stony Ditch onto the more seaward, shingle part of the Ness, all of this movement – the spit, the birds, the planes, the radar signals – seemed to drift uneasily in and out of the still silence as the landscape became increasingly barren. Either side of the Trust’s designated track, the flatness of the open expanse of shingle made a seemless transition to it, and the strangeness of the scattered concrete and metal forms were inviting me away from it. But the secrecy of the site’s military past works as fence posts from which the Trust hang barrier lines along the sides of the path, lines fed to the visitors as they step off the boat – lines about the danger of unexploeded ordnance, the protection of bird sancturaries – and the path becomes a tightrope.

Reaching the Bomb Ballistics Building, I encountered the strange experience of being in a museum about itself. Up on the top of this building, the telescope from WWII testing days is the only approachable object in the flat concrete square (there was another, a large green hulk of metal, whose purpose you can read about on the floor below, inside the building, but this hulk remains bolted closed). Earlier on, the white body of a low-flying plane had skimmed overhead, cracking open the present-day sky, pushing through it images of the site-in-action more firmly than had any of the still and silent buildings back in The Street. And now, as I bent to look through the abandoned telescope, its cross-hair slid uninterested over the castle, over the green pastures of the mainland, over the quaint boats in Orford Quay, longing instead to hook onto the plane that had passed out of sight.

Crossing from the Bomb Ballistics Building to the lighthouse, the shingle shifted and slipped underneath me, and crunching and ripping through the silence it locked my attention into the space around my feet. I could easily have trudged all the way to the lighthouse like this, the shingle pulling me downwards and the Trust’s path pulling me forwards. But up on top of the Bomb Ballistics Building I’d seen the gentle shapes of the ‘Pagodas’ in the South, the delicately translucent aerials rising from the Cobra Mist site in the North, the rectangular buildings on the far side of Stony Ditch, the stark and pointed Black Beacon, the awkward protrusions of decaying AWRE laboratories from behind the shingle banked up beside them, the concrete scattered and rusted metal splayed on the shingle, the vastness of this shingle, and finally, the sea. Remembering all of this, I pulled my eyes up from my feet to try and take it in from ground level. But this was hard! The parallel lines of ridges in the shingle, ridges that converge on each other all too soon in seductive vanishing points, sucked my gaze along them instead. My feet were stuck to the Trust’s path and my eyes flung up and down the shingle.

Past the lighthouse, the shingle drops steeply towards the sea. Down here, none of what I had been trying to stare at up there is any longer visible. Down here, the sea roars; the silence on the flat shingle above a distant past, the crunching underfoot expanding outwards to meet the roar rushing inwards. Down here, the sea broods in grey-yellow-blue; the buildings on the flat shingle above a distant past, the glistening swells drifting upwards and downwards. This is where the National Trust volunteers recommend the visitors sit for lunch. Then, back on top of the bank, the Trust’s path to the Black Beacon leads you along the high tide line, demarcated by scraps of black seaweed, a lighter, a sandal, the obligatory piece of blue rope, half of a small blue ball. I got the impression that the debris from the sea and the debris of military-scientific research were calling to one another above my head, playing a game I wanted to join, but trudging through the shingle, I was too slow to keep up.

By now, I was reaching the old Police Watch Tower on the perimeter of the AWRE site, from which intruders would have been identified, and discrete red arrows pointed along its edge towards the Black Beacon. The Trust recommends the view of the inaccessible AWRE laboratories that can be had from the Black Beacon, and so I climbed to the third floor of this octagonal building and gazed through the narrow window on each of its sides in turn. Each window is flanked by a labelled line drawing of the view, so I know that this structure over here is laboratory 3, that the water there is the North Sea, and that that unlabelled heap of metal over there is to be ignored as irrelevant. After having felt so immersed in the shingle and the flatness, the height of this building and the apparent clarity of the diagram give me a relieving sense of distance from the landscape. Framed, the landscape seemed now to conform to an order, and from this distance, I even felt a sense of power over it. How is it possible to feel in control of a site that is essentially a collection of decaying rubbish?

Outside again, it was a hot day, and rushing swirls of heat haze seemed to prize the Pagodas away from the ground, to sever their connection to the shingle on which I stood, making them distant, untouchable, unreachable. Approaching further, I saw closer the banks of shingle piled against the other AWRE laboratories, saw the laboratories nestling into the shingle, crouching behind it in comfort from my intruding eyes, and I remembered that this is a Nature Reserve, that certain things are not to be disturbed. Approaching closer, I saw the banks further as burial grounds, as solemn memorials to the suffering of the Ness at the blasting hands of military science. One step further and the shingle shifted again, inviting me to climb up and roll down like a sand dune in a purpose-built playground.

Not all of the AWRE laboratories are off-limits: laboratory 1, the closest, invites the visitors in through a damp, quiet hallway with a glow of green at the far end. Putting off the moment when the green glow could come to life, I drifted into first one dark side room (and stood still, my adjusting eyes finding only emptiness) and then another (rubble on the floor, switches on the wall). Finally, nose against the fence, I met the outside inside as it came streaming between the roof’s bare beams, flooded past fluorescent lights limply floating, streaked down the walls in swathes of algae, fell onto fresh leaves freely sprouting, and slipped away into the pit on the right where bombs used to be subjected to a hydraulic ram.

A group adventure walking through the Yorkshire Wolds, soft chalk hills unobtrusive to sky, nation.

The theme of the first day was unity and disunity.
The group met a large road; a road too large to cross, cars running East and West all at once. There were those who thought the bridge over the road far in the distance was the obvious solution, even though our path was due to continue North wihtout any such detours.
And there were those who were impatient. Impetulently, in a lull in traffic, they crossed the road; they found it easy to cross, they revelled in how easy it had been.
They thought the others would follow, they thought this was the best method of persuasion. The others walked to the bridge.
A flashback to childhood arguments flared up five seconds into a fleeting phone call between me and my bridge-headed brother. Enraged frustration flared so fiercly that the phone call no longer seemed possible, did not last long enough to allow communication of the others' plan, a plan for a short-cut from the other side of the far-away bridge to a later point in the path we had been following, following in unity.
Disunity followed; followed both forks at once, followed us waiting for their return from the bridge to the true path, followed them not returning to us from the bridge on their new path. The true impass the first phone call, fixed assertions, fuming siblings; the true bridge the second phone call, the gentle malleability of the new mediators, with their mutable meandering towards a new and mutually reached meeting point.
Now we all meander.

The theme of the second day was balance.
The group was in harmony. It rejoiced in its unity because it was no longer innocent . It sought to further characterise itself, allotting roles to its members and themes to its days. Nick became the shepherd of the group, and cheif in charge of optimism. Dick, the risk and safety officer, from whom permission for any proposed venture must be obtained. Saffron, the magical elf, in charge of stamping Dick's documents. Charlie, the philosopher king, ready to balance the pragmatism of the safety officer. Anne, chief in charge of maintaining diversity within unity. Sophia, the reader of maps. Lisa, the writer of speeches for Anne, was chief in charge of public relations for all members of the group. And finally, Rich, the planner, became known as god.
The group had joked of making a social contract. This seemed to be it.

The themes of the third day were ups-and-downs, formlessness and death.
Heavy sky fell on trudging feet.
As the group rolled on, flat to the ground, thick clouds pressed down, and rolling hills pushed them up towards and wrenched them away again, they found a dizzy cycle.
Death on the sides of the roads.
As they all saw it, crowded round it, peered down on it, the philosopher king diagnosed: death on the ground.
A special detour to a village with a highly spoken-of tearoom, the group peered through the gap between the sky and the ground towards the village, the stop, the coffee, the rest, the warm aroma. But the tearoom was closed, the village useless. Only a damp bench and a lovesick cockeral. Instead of a triumphant 'cock-a-doodle-doo', the dying note of 'cock-a-uhhhhh' expressed: "Without you, I am... no. To me, you are... no. I compare thee to a summer's... no, no good. I wish... no. You... oh god," and so on. But after the village had passed, a released trigger propelled clouds into receding sky!
After the village, new vigour expelled mud clogged in throat and eyes!
After, light voices pattered on the ground, dipped in and out of dappled sounds.
They rushed ahead; we called them back.
They stopped at a gate to see who would go first, watched and waited and on they burst.
They tripped over each other; we let them.
After, light voices at our feet lay scattered around, slid over each other to rest and
meander.
This was the first day that Lisa fell over with laughter. The fall was not dramatic; it was a topple. Lisa toppled over with laughter.
The grass didn't mind; it had never seen anything quite like it. It replayed it to itself: the voice and the words and the way they had weaved their way into her walking path; the stop and the pause and the slow, gentle; the loss of control and the long, drawn out; the others turning around and still she hadn't quite; and then there she was.

The themes of the fourth day were repetition, crossing boundaries, aches and cakes, grumpiness


The theme of the fifth day was reevaluation, life and ways of being.
The group reached its collective climax. The themes from the previous days were seen in new lights, and a set of maxims were made: sleep in squalour, dine in company, walk slowly, sit quietly, and die alone like a dog.
This was the day that Sophia fell over. It was dramatic; a collapse. Earlier in the day, she had found how to walk in the land rather than on flat gridded paper, had become indifferent to the map she had clutched, had pretended not to hear when they asked who would be taking it, had watched how the others approached the role, had let it go. But now, walking with the chalk grass hedge soil: the sudden sight of a blank hole, a swift silent seeping into no role. The group pored over this stillness on the ground, poured into it a new role, and when she was convinced, she got up.

The theme of the last day was fine, final.