Orford Ness - A photowalk through Suffolk’s secret past
Orford is a pretty fishing village tucked away on a remote part of the Suffolk coast. Wander down from the square, past pretty cottages and tiny pubs to the quay and aside from the shiny, modern 4x4s parked along the road it’s not hard to imagine that this sleepy fishing village has changed little in a hundred years. But taking in the timeless view from the Quay it is harder to believe that back then, close to 1000 people would have been working at a top secret military testing site just 150 metres across the River Ore on Orford Ness.
From 1913 until the early 80s Orford Ness, an ever shifting shingle spit reaching almost ten miles down the Suffolk coast was used for everything from a WWI prisoner of war camp to developing radar during WWII to a Cold War atomic weapons research facility. Today the site is a nature reserve managed by the National Trust. Many of the early buildings are long gone and, unable to be restored, what remains is slowly returning to nature. This combination of derelict, often sinister looking buildings under the big skies of a bleak and barren landscape, wrapped in a secret and fascinating history is hard to resist for photographers and the photo walks I run here every year are one of my most popular photography workshops in East Anglia.
The focus of these workshops is black and white photography. Strip away the colour and the bold shapes and contrasts and stark nature of the place really come to the fore. That said, Orford Ness is actually quite a colourful place in summer. When the wildflowers are in bloom the shingle is brought to life by splashes of pink, yellow, purple and white as flowers spring up in abundance amongst the concrete and shingle. This contrast between the brutal, man-made structures and the nature that is reclaiming the Ness is one of the things that draws me to photograph it but that can be captured just as well in monochrome.
Infrared works particularly well here because the greens of plants are rendered in bright almost white tones making them glow against the dark shapes of the buildings.
Long exposure photography is another technique that lends itself to the location and the medium, with a very slow shutter speed, ideally around 2 minutes or more, the clouds will blur and streak across the sky giving the impression of passing time.
Nature is thriving on the various habitats here, as well as the earlier mentioned wildflowers, the Ness is home to hare, Chinese water deer, grey seals and an abundance of birdlife including marsh harriers and barn owls. We regularly encounter hares on our walks across the shingle but the main attraction of the workshop is the area around the Atomic Weapons Research laboratories, an area usually closed to the public but as the workshops are run with the National Trust on days when the Ness is closed, we have the place to ourselves and access to the whole site. It is a big site too, with so much to photograph, we only manage to cover a fraction of it but we still walk around 5 or 6 miles before stopping for a much needed rest and packed lunch before getting the boat back to the mainland.
Any photography trip that involves getting a boat there and back is going to be an adventure, if you’d like to join me on one of next year’s Orford Ness adventures be sure to sign up to my email newsletter to be the first to hear of the new dates.
