Unit 7 at/in/on the Ness

Although the trip over to Orford Ness, the focus of this years research, took place on the third week of October, digesting the experience has taken a while. Thankfully that time has conveniently aligned with a packed timetable that has slowed posting.

The Ness consists of various territories which we had all observed from a map view, yet seeing first hand offered much to heighten the experience of its parts. After crossing the threshold of the river Alde by boat we are placed in familiar marshland which shrouds the shore and the vegetated shingle spit.

Crossing the bridge over Stony Ditch leads you onto the shingle, an English coastal desert with fragile vegetation and redundant constructions. Scale and depth is abstracted on this land, skewed even at close range.

The shingle is host to a litter of relics, purposefully left to decay by the National Trust, once used by the military for the testing of ballistics and atomic weapons. Their presence on the landscape at one time revered is now embedded in local memory, but will still answer to the whims of the natural acts eroding the shoreline.

There were a few photographic accidents, some of which had serendipitous results.

Bex Roberts wrote an elequant piece found on the real time site.