Richard Uridge travels to Orford Ness, which is ten miles long, a mile wide and sits off the coast of Suffolk sandwiched between the river Alde-Ore and the North Sea. The flat wild landscape of the spit is composed entirely of shingle and is the largest vegetated shingle spit in Europe. It's an important habitat for breeding and wading birds as well as a haven for rare plant species.

For 90 years the Ness has been a site of military research and testing. The First World War biplane pilots of the Royal Flying Corps tested their bombs here; Watson-Watt and his colleagues invented radar; and Blue Danube, Britain's first nuclear bomb went through a range of experiments on the Ness. The shingle spit is littered with concrete bunkers and research labs from the cold war and "chalets" that turn out to be magazine stores for First World War shells. They're all now redundant and slowly decaying. The military left in the 1980s and the site has been taken over by the National Trust, whose policy of benign neglect is perhaps the most practical solution to managing such a large and windblown site.
Orford Ness info
National Trust info
BBC History: The Cold War
The Aldeburgh River
Alde and Ore Estuaries
Suffolk Coast and Heaths

Grant Lahoar, property manager and warden at the Ness, talks about the site's scientific importance and how the spit was created by wave power and longshore drift. The shingle has been deposited by the sea and the tides and the Ness is constantly, almost imperceptibly, moving southwards.

Roger Thomas has surveyed the military buildings for English Nature and he gives Richard an insight into the extent of the work done at the Ness and the range of architecture it produced.

Keith Wood first worked at Orfordness in the 1930s and was involved in the early experiments in radar. Most of his career was spent working in nuclear weapons research. He headed a team that tested Britain's first nuclear bomb for stability. They constructed experiments to see if the bomb could be transported safely from storage to airfield. The bomb (without the nuclear core) was vibrated and shaken to measure its reaction to extreme stresses. It was a dangerous job as the bomb still contained its high explosive and the buildings were specially constructed to contain any explosions if accidents happened.

Richard Newman is a local historian and Richard meets him at the northern edge of the spit near Aldeburgh. He tells Richard of the military history of the coast. At a Martello Tower, one of a string of fortresses dotted along the coast built to counter the threat of invasion by the French, he points out how the coast changes and how the mouth of the river Alde-Ore has moved as much as two miles in a couple of generations.

Email Open Country: [email protected]

The BBC is not responsible for external web sites