Orford Ness - on film!

Finally I get round to it!

So about a month ago now the lovely Niall drove us both all the way across the country to Orford in Suffolk to see Orford Ness, via his parents who kindly put us up for the night & provided us with excellent picnic materials.

I expect I should probably explain what Orford Ness is (Click here for Wikipedia explanation instead.). It's a shingle spit just off the coast of Suffolk. And by just I mean just, the boat journey takes about a minute! You can see in the google map:

View Larger Map
So why did we drive all the way across the country to see an island? Well, it has an interesting history: As well as being an exciting geographical phenomenon (it's made of shingle which has many rare plants growing on it) it's got some interesting history and it shows. The whole island was acquired by the MOD years ago and used for secret military testing during WW-s I & II, lots of which involved dropping bombs on it! Later on, during the cold war, there was an Atomic Weapons Research Establishment base where detonators and bomb casings were tested. Apart from that there's the "Cobra Mist" site where experiments leading to RADAR happened. Now the BBC World Service and a Dutch station are broadcast from there.
Anyway, up until 1992 or so(?) the entire place was under the Official Secrets Act and the public didn't know what went on there. Since then it's been looked after by the National Trust, who open it to the public under the title of nature reserve! There are still restrictions on where you can go, mainly to stop you a) disturbing rare plants & destroying their habitat b) having a derelict building fall on you c) being blown up by some of the tonnes of unexploded ordnance that is probably in the midst of all that shingle! The paths are well marked...

After a 6am start & the final leg of the journey, we reached Orford, parked the car and bought our tickets in time for the 10am boat. Unfortunately they'd miscounted
and we got bumped off and onto the 10.20 boat (and called us Mr & Mrs Wold!). Oh well. The jolly boatman took us across at 10.20 and a nice lady on the other side sold us a guidebook with a map in, showed us what was open and told us about boats back; you have to get off the island by a certain time or you're stuck! The lady who sold us the tickets takes the names & phone numbers of all the visitors so they know exactly who's there.
So we set out and walked all over the place, down every possible path & around every building. The weather turned lovely and many photos were taken, by the end we were well-exercised and even slightly sunburnt!

Of course, when the sun came out so did the slide film! It's the Velvia 100F which I'd cross-processed before. Sadly it seems that my ME Super is metering oddly as all of these came out rather dark and under-exposed. Also the purple tinge is probably due to my own cack-handed scanning; I'd been taught how to scan black and white negatives and didn't think to alter the colours as I scanned my slides. Yes, I'm a n00b.


The view from the bridge across the creek

Mud by the creek with mysterious metal poking out...

The lovely lovely lighthouse

Niall photographing it

Plants growing in the shingle


The sparkly sparkly sea & shingly beach

The police tower, for spotting intruders!

Some of the amazing coloured rusty metal lying around

The view from one of the small buildings that now houses information


Inside one of the AWRE buildings, water has collected in a bomb bay & the ceiling's fallen in

Looking back out of the door

The same building from the outside

A plant struggling through the concrete


In the marshes, out towards the Cobra Mist site

A derelict toilet in the plate store, this building was falling apart in the most amazing way

Rusty crusty switches, also in the plate store

And that's all I've got. No doubt if my small camera still worked there'd be lots of awfully white balanced photos that show the general vast emptiness of the place, but there aren't!

For more information on visiting the place see the National Trust's website.
For a better (and more prolific with film) photographer's take on Orford Ness there's Niall's Orford Ness blog post.
All these photos were taken on Fuji Velvia 100F with my Pentax ME Super. For the full set at Orford Ness, see my set on Flickr.