Taking a Walk
Patrick Barkham
Nothing can prepare you for the Ness. I have no idea how the world might look after a nuclear holocaust but I once witnessed the damage caused by a tsunami and it was something like the seaward side of Orford Ness. This slender femur of shingle stretching down the Suffolk coast is naturally strange, a constantly changing promontory of marsh, meadow and stones. Known locally as ‘the Island’, the Ness is the largest vegetated shingle spit in Europe, containing an estimated fifteen per cent of our planet’s coastal vegetated shingle, a fragile, arid ecosystem of pebble-loving, salt-tolerant plants.
But a walk reveals its unnatural strangeness. For eighty years of the last century, the general public was not permitted onto this inaccessible peninsula. Orford Ness was a secret military site. During the First World War, scientists experimented with explosives, incendiary bullets to attack Zeppelins and, most improbably, the production of artificial clouds. Between the wars, the Ness played a big part in radar development. After the Second World War, it hosted atomic-age experiments: testing triggers, bomb ballistics and nose cones for bombs and delivery systems.
The Ness may have been visible from the small town of Orford but it was no easier to reach than the Nevada desert or a South Sea atoll, observed W G Sebald in
The Rings of Saturn, his hallucinogenic account of his wanderings in this part of the world. These days, the Ness is open to the public but it’s still a wilderness of hazardous waste, abandoned to the birds and scarred by sheds, shacks and masts; replete with rumours of death rays, lethal experiments and faked invasions.
I could only hear the wind when I tiptoed, alone, across the shingle towards the ruins of ‘the pagodas’, six large, derelict, concrete laboratories, cathedrals of the Cold War. The shingle was scattered with fifty-year-old debris. A pit in the shingle was crammed with enormous twists of red, rusted metal. A torn corner of corrugated metal creaked. The labs appeared to have been blown up overnight but had actually been shredded by sea and salt wind over three decades.
As I stepped up to the doorway of Lab 1, a cacophony of shrieks made me jump: baby jackdaws, nesting in a rusty vent. Rosebay willowherb, nettles, daisies, elder: all the dereliction specialists were here. Dwarf forget-me-nots adorned the concrete roadway. The inhabitants of this deserted community were wary of me. My ears rang with lark tinnitus, the highflying birds as invisible as a spy plane. A Chinese water deer skulked away, pausing to turn its fangs towards me. I felt as nervy as them, perhaps because there was so little familiarity in this scene. The only comforting thing that gave the Ness a sense of scale and anchored it not in a dystopian future but in recent centuries was the sturdy, red-striped lighthouse on the beach. And coastal erosion entails its imminent destruction.
I found comfort in another flat-roofed building with big windows and nicotine-coloured bricks: it looked like my old 1950s primary school, albeit with windows shattered after the world’s end. I stepped beyond the yellow Danger! notices and a corridor stretched ahead. On the walls were big iron radiators: oddly reassuring when you ran your palm over their cold curves. A swallow dipped around the broken eaves. A ginger rabbit appeared and disappeared like a whisper on the gravel. By the door of the final lab was a big red emergency stop button like those in Cold War movies. I pressed it. Lesser black-backed gulls screamed in the sky. The world kept turning.
Orford Ness, OS Explorer 212 Woodbridge & Saxmundham. Access by National Trust ferry from Orford Quay. 31st March-23rd June, Sat only; 26th June-29th September, Tue-sat. Ferry out every twenty minutes 10am-2pm; return ferries until 5pm. Arrive in good time – tickets sold on the day. Some walking routes restricted during spring bird-nesting season.