If ever there was a location specifically designed for tens of thousands of A Level Geography students to visit, year upon year, then it’s this one.
Orford Ness off the Suffolk coast. Bring on the pacamacs, the clipboards and the shivering fingers.
It’s the largest vegetated shingle spit in Europe. At around ten miles in length but with an absolute maximum height above sea level of just thirteen feet it can, perhaps, best be described as ‘flat’, that oft-made and inaccurate comment that is usually reserved for the neighbouring county of Norfolk.
Featureless and wickedly exposed to all the elements that can be thrown at it by the North Sea, Florida it most definitely isn’t. Which is probably why Orford Ness is such a popular haven for sadistic Geography lecturers. You can almost see the sodden notebooks and drooping sandwiches now.
It’s no Aldeburgh or Southwold. It’s not even a Felixstowe. Because Orford Ness has, for various reasons, always been a lonely and yet a somewhat underrated spot, one that, up to the early 1900’s was solely used for animal grazing on the spits reclaimed marshland. A wild and desolate place, as Private Fraser from Dad’s Army might have said.
‘A wild and desolate place’. Mind you, it does have a lighthouse. Orford Ness (Shutterstock)
That is, until 1915 when, energised by the possibilities that seemed to be offered by aircraft in warfare (the B.E.2 biplane, for example, had primarily been used in reconnaissance roles) the Royal Flying Corps constructed an airstrip on part of the reclaimed marshes, together with an assortment of buildings intended for critical logistical and other support services.
In addition to that, they laid out a stretch of railway track which ran from the airfield to a jetty. This was ideal for supplies that were brought in by boat as it gave them the capability of swiftly transporting said supplies over to the airfield (which was now dedicated to not only testing new aircraft as well but the armaments that came with them, including machine guns and bombs) buildings.
Walk with care at Orford Ness! (Shutterstock)
Sometimes, desolation can have it’s uses.
The site was soon and very rapidly developed for a range of other research related projects, all of which were intended to improve the effectiveness of the aeroplane which remained, at the time, a raw novice as far as its application in the theatre of war was concerned.
It didn’t take long for the ‘powers that be’ to work out that, as Orford Ness was, even for East Anglia, a relatively remote and unpopulated spot, it could be usefully engaged as a site for the testing of much bigger ballistics. This meant bombs of all shapes and sizes which could be dropped onto Orford Ness without really bothering anyone and certainly not provoking letters from angry residents had they, for example, opted to do so in the afore mentioned and nearby Aldeburgh.
So, to paraphrase the words of the mighty John Betjeman, the invitation went out to ‘…come friendly bombs and fall on Orford Ness’, with testing on ballistics of that nature continuing into the 1950’s and beyond as the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment used the site for environmental testing that simulated the conditions that a nuclear weapon might experience during actual service use.
In other words, they needed to consider whether or not the performance of a nuclear weapon might have been affected if the poor thing, bless it, was too cold, hot, damp or just having a bad day in general.
“Yes, that one worked”. The only way to see if a nuclear bomb is up to the job. (Shutterstock)
The legacy of the MoD’s long presence at Orford Ness are the remains of several structures that still litter it’s otherwise featureless landscape to this day. One of those is known as the Control Room and Hard Target which, as its name suggests, was designed and built as what is euphemistically referred to as an ‘impact facility’.
I’ll leave you, wise reader, to work out what that might mean. The fact that, as the photograph shows, this particular structure looks relatively undamaged suggests that the bombs that were either dropped onto, or launched at it, were not exactly the most powerful that were available at the time.
An ‘impact facility’ at Orford Ness. Still in one piece. (Ian Sporne)
Can you visit Orford Ness today? Indeed you can, although access is limited in terms of when the spit (which is currently owned and administered by the National Trust) is open to visitors and how you can reach it, given that access is usually by way of a ferry which is also provided by the National Trust. So check their website for more details.
Rest assured, however, that the whole area retains an air of mystery and can be, at the best of times, a very atmospheric place to explore. It is also, for once, given the National Trust’s interest in this particular landscape, one that has had nothing whatsoever to do with Capability Brown.
Which makes a change.