Stephen Rutt

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

Nagy. In Hungarian it means ‘great’, pronounced with a nasal ‘oi’ sound for the vowel, and with tongue to palette, spitting out the G sound. I can’t pronounce it the same way twice, but the result is surprisingly intelligible to waitresses, bar staff and our guide Tamás. It’s hard to know who is more surprised, me that it works or the locals who seem to be unfamiliar with English tourists trying.

***
Ahead of me is the puszta. The great Hungarian plain and the westernmost stretch of steppe in Eurasia. In the very distance — unfathomably flat and far — trees shimmer, shake and levitate, a fair distance above the clear sky swimming beneath. Clear spring skies. The air is hot and heavy. The soil says it hasn’t rained in weeks.

I thought I knew Hungary but I didn’t. Like it’s language, it never seems to stay the same. It is not settled, easy to master. I had it as Cambridgeshire on a vast scale: fen and farms. Flat, wet and traditionally kept — grey cattle, Racka sheep, the Mangalica pigs — an East Anglia with a better range of birds. I recently came across the poet C.P. Cavafy in a great piece by Amy Liptrot:

    You shall not find new places; other seas
    you shall not find. The place shall follow you.
    And you shall walk the same familiar streets

I was, the first time I was here, an East Anglian abroad in East Anglia: all wetlands and thin copses, and birds half-familiar. Though I did see a Black Stork and think it was, in that sun-addled moment of it sailing over on effortless wings, the most magnificent thing.

I was wrong. Away from the old fish ponds and reedbeds, there is a vast expanse of even older grassland. The flat sublime. A landscape impossible to take in in its entirety.

***

The woods here are not of nature’s doing. We drove up to one, firmly attached to the ground, though it probably levitates too if you look from the dusty red-roofed town on the edge of the horizon. Under communism swathes of the Hortobagy was dyked, irrigated and ploughed. Damage that is slowly being repaired. The trees that were planted here were, oddly, American. You can find Aspens with rookeries and Nightingales in them, and it is bizarre, incongruous and not as ecologically useless as you might expect. For although the Hortobagy is a natural grassland, these trees provide nesting grounds for lots of birds that would otherwise struggle, such as the Rooks. The Rooks have to compete with the Red-footed Falcons returning from the very south of Africa, who take over old Rook nests. In this hot, bare wood the Rooks croak. Spring is black and guttural. The falcons perched in the trees shriek like London parakeets. Grey males and orange females seeing the Rooks off their stolen nest-spaces and snatching insects over the grassland.

The grassland here is Sousliks scurrying, worrying amongst the brown waves and white ribbons of chamomile flowers. A Saker — large, so large — hunts overhead. Another of the Souslik’s predators, the Long-legged Buzzard, spirals on the thermals overhead. More of a fawn and orange than the Common Buzzards that sit on every fence and motorway sign here. The Sousliks never settle.

The falcon and the buzzard bear a familial similarity to British birds. It is a subtle exotic, the familiar yet different. It leads to a kind of uncanny birding where slight differences make different species, whilst the wagtail in the long grass has a blue-grey head, long yellow stripe above its an eye and is the same species as our Yellow Wagtail.


***

That night from the track outside our hotel on the edge of the Hortobagy, we watch a distant storm in the south west horizon. Lightning raking the sky. No rain falls on us, but the warm storm wind blows anyway. When the lightning flashes it lights up the serpent-like sidewinding of dust down the track.

The Nightingales sing regardless.

***

Two days earlier we were somewhere in eastern Hungary. Somewhere off the map in our hands, navigating by Tamás’s head into the land beyond the plain. If you had unfair stereotypes of Hungary, here is why they are manifest. A landscape of intensively farmed fields, flat and hedgeless. A colourless place and a ferocious sun — we drive past a man strimming the verge while wearing only his pants. For every absolutely gorgeous part of the country, Hungary has these places that feel neglected, run-down and unloved. We take a couple of minor roads and end up in the middle of a desert. A ploughed field that extends all around into a panorama of dust and dirt. There is no cover other than a few meagre, stunted trees by the road. All is arid and brown. A vision of over-farmed hell. An uncared for land.

‘When we discovered this place there were 50 pairs here. Now there are 2.’

It’s hard to imagine what 50 pairs of Short-toed Larks in song, rippling across this barren place would be like.

Tamás pokes the soil with his tripod leg.

‘They need this dry, dusty soil. They used to be a speciality of the Hortobagy but in parts it is under grazed and they don’t breed there now. Same with Kentish Plover and Collared Pratincole’.

The worth of a guide is that he can navigate to places like this. It begins to feel a little like cheating when after five minutes you’re watching half the Hungarian population of Short-toed Larks, crawling between the furrows, a tiny sandy speck in a vast brown plane.

***

The next evening it spits with rain. Grey clouds rolling in over the steppe, promising future storms. A big sky, bigger than I’m used to. We sought shelter by a ruined farm, riddled with bullet holes. We passed a T34 tank on a plinth by the road: a monument to the Battle of Debrecen, when the Hortobagy was a front for a tank battle between the broken and soon to be defeated nazis and the red army sweeping through eastern Europe. Or perhaps from the Soviet occupation of Hungary — the Hortobagy is just inhospitable enough for forced labour camps.

A Barn Owl detached itself from the farmhouse and slips into the gathering gloom. It is not used to people being there for large parts of the Hortobagy are restricted access and to get onto the plain requires a guide and is strictly policed. I have mixed feelings about this but it indisputably provides Great Bustards with the space to thrive — and all the other open grassland loving wildlife of the area.

The landscape is charged with absence. The bullet holes in the farmhouse chill. The trees have no leaves. There are no people, nobody working, other than lorries thundering past a road just visible on the horizon. It is a haunting, inscrutable place in these overcast moods. Not East Anglian in the slightest. Whilst we are stood there nothing arrives and nothing leaves. A couple of Roe deer bucks leap from patches of long grass to long grass, the only movement, the only thing other than a vast still quietness.

And then we pick out one, three, then six Great Bustards out in the grass. Not too far from the Roe Deer in size, a fabulously eccentric bird with a fanned tail that almost reaches its head, a tigerish mottled orange and black back, whiskers that fan out from its grey, turkey-like face. When it shakes, it ruffles its entire plumage, flashing white like a can-can dancer.

It is an absurd bird. A relic from Europe’s past as a flat and open and remote country; a bird for Europe’s future where places like this remain protected for their self-evident qualities. 4 Accent 6;

I’ve recently been discussing landscape with a good friend and it has reminded me that my taste in landscape is an acquired one. She is excited to be among the baize and bone of chalk downland; I am thrilled by marshes, space and the absence of ‘landscape’. We both grew up in the same part of Suffolk. She turned inland in the search of English hills and I turned outward, looking for the edges. She thinks these marshes are boring. I think I get it from dad, who as a child asked to go on holiday ‘somewhere bleak’. I’ve always felt the same, as if taste in landscape was genetic and not formed from a patchwork of childhood memories involving seawalls and shingle beaches and ever-grey skies.
 
I mention this in lieu of explanation. It was dad’s fifty-something birthday and we were stood on the selvedge of a seawall, admiring the scimitar curve of Essex. We were stood on an island but it is almost indistinguishable from the mainland. Behind us: a yachting village the other side of the river. The Crouch washes the bank metres from our feet and stretches east, merges with the Roach and dissipates into the shallow muddy expanse of the North Sea. In front of us: Kentish power stations are dark smudges in the murk, the Thames hidden and betrayed only by ships apparently sailing through dry fields. The marsh is essentially a building site. It has yellow cranes and diggers — emblazoned with Hawk — spread across it. Here is where the dirt being dug out from under London by Crossrail is being shipped to and turned into a new island in the river. The island will be an RSPB reserve and the noticeboard has optimistic images of Spoonbills. While they have high hopes for here, politicians bicker over whether to build a Crossrail station over my local park.

If the new nature is that which we can find in the margins of our urban lives, then I guess this is the new old nature. The desolate and remote locations of old nature, but a nature made by diggers and trains instead of fences and signs. We can lose sight that nature is as often man-made as it is man-destroyed. And the wildlife? A Rough-legged Buzzard hung over the marsh, flickering wings and spread tail, showing its patchwork of peat and cream plumage. A Hen Harrier ghosted low along the ditches, terrifying partridges and a Marsh Harrier drifted higher over the wetter areas, worrying the wildfowl. They do not care about the diggers.

But the real highlight was the Corn Bunting. In a crop field by the car park we found one. Dumpy, streaky and very brown, it is what is thought of as a birder’s bird. We found another, and another, until the crop field was alive with birds moving amongst the leaves. The flock was at least 100 strong, which would’ve been unremarkable 100 years ago. Perhaps even 50. But since then they’ve declined by 90% throughout Britain. A bird that used to be so local that populations 30km apart could sing with different dialects, they are the canary in the coal mine of British agriculture. I hadn’t seen this amount of Corn Buntings in my entire life, before today. I wasn’t even aware such gatherings happened in the 21st century.

And I remember when I last saw a Corn Bunting. I was a couple of miles into the Sussex downs with the same friend who is now so excited to be moving there. It had rained all morning and we were on the top of the green escarpment. Around us the landscape seemed like a dream of genteel Englishness, a period fiction of the past. From a manure dump a Corn Bunting sang its tuneless jangle. It looked as though it could’ve been shaped out of a lump of soil and straw, earth magicked to life. I was excited. My friend was bored, irascible, thoroughly uncharmed. Evidently an acquired taste.