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.
