The lighthouse edges closer to the North Sea.
It will go the way of Slaughden, five miles north of here and sixty two years a
relic under the sea. Or perhaps like Orford harbour, suffocated by shingle.
Nothing lasts forever on the shifting stones of Orford Ness. The waves made
this sculpted shingle spit, the waves remake it and the waves take from it too.
Underfoot it crunches like the waves that break upon the shore. Rain. Leaves,
miles from the nearest tree, are blown on the wind. A hare skims over the shingle
crests like tumbleweed. Tumbleweed, that is, that hunkers down to the stones
behind the sickly green sea kale and disappears completely.
To disappear completely in a landscape that could be drawn like an
architect’s plan, a landscape of regular lines and flat horizons would seem
difficult. Even with the weather settling in, when either end of the spit
disappears into the greyness of distance, the in-between space seems impossibly
open. But the repetition of shingle and its undulations played a trick on me.
The dappled colour, the pointillism of the land warped my eyes. I felt the
shingle rising, floating around me, a disorientation in the way that no shingle
beach had done to me before.
The walk around Orford Ness takes you back to
the military huts across the salt marsh channel on a bridge with no sides,
along a ribbon of broken concrete.
I am beckoned into the dark. Laboratory four. My eyes adjust to the green
and the dust and the dirt. A bone lies in the corner, dully shining. I
pick up a hard hat from the pile. On one wall paint is cracking and peeling,
like a layer of lichen; the ceiling camouflaged by the creep of algae across
the concrete. With the guide I descend down a crumbling, darkened set of
stairs, handrail flaking rust, to the bottom.
He explains. They call these the pagodas. The
overlapping concrete roof, raised on columns with a dome of wind-sculpted
shingle on top gives them the look of a religious building. The reason for this
is because the roof is designed to break apart. The high windows blow out, the
columns give way, the concrete breaks in the middle and the shingle pours in
like a waterfall, sealing the building and whatever remains inside.
An instant tomb. A shingle sepulchre.
Everything else is, apparently, a mystery.
Geiger counters suggest that nuclear material was not tested on site, though
the evidence that does exist says that the explosive triggers that cause the
nuclear reactions in atom bombs were. It’s hard to tell anything from the
evidence left inside laboratory four: the walls are as high as a church, clad
with metal panels with crucifixes cut out of them. Rusting veins of
pipes still run. Of the numbers stencilled on the walls, the number 23 is
the least faded.
23 years ago W. G. Sebald walked on the shingle here, feeling like he was
passing through an undiscovered country, and though the feeling remains it is
no long the same. The year after he came the National Trust bought the site and
set about discovering it. Paths were made safe, cleared of the ordinance that
still crops up, unearthed by the progress of shingle. Buildings were surveyed.
Archives were explored, information collected, former soldiers spoken too.
Truth is relative here. Story proliferates. I was told that the radar warehouse
halfway up the Ness contains the wreck of a UFO found at Rendlesham and that
the sea between here and Shingle Street was one day set ablaze — and charred uniformed
bodies washed ashore. Allegedly.
This is not the same National Trust that does
tea rooms in manor halls. The manners here are decay and entropy, its spirit
not tamed, its truth still elusive. A progressive preservation of a place that
— without celebration or judgement — has become a museum to Suffolk’s
small part in mutually assured destruction. A museum to the apocalypse
that it nearly caused.
23 years ago, knowing only that it was once the site of military testing,
Sebald felt that he was ‘amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its
extinction in some future catastrophe’. A place that eluded him and his all
knowing voice. It eludes still.
I come over clammy, claustrophobic in the dark of laboratory four. The
weight of shingle on the roof oppresses, the certainty of a building designed
to smother and suffocate completely. Back out in the bright light of the cloudy
day, amongst the ruined outbuildings, wire shells and sprawl of brambles, I can
breathe again.
In the shelter of one of the buildings sits
the casing from an old nuclear missile, a collection of military signs, and
photographs of soldiers. In the doorway a garden cross spider trailing silk,
manipulates its back legs and weaves its web from the outside in. From the
brambles strewn among the huts a goldcrest forages, gleaning invisible insects
from the thick clumps of leaves and thorns, its crown of gold glowing in the
late afternoon gloom. It is the most alive thing on this almost island of the
dead.
What will survive of us is not love but brambles, rocks and concrete.
3
Stephen Rutt 