"The first rule of Orford Ness," the ferryman told me once, "is never believe anything you're told about it

The Untrue Island

This article in the Guardian;

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/jul/08/untrue-island-orford-ness-macfarlane

is about Robert Macfarlane' s libretto (words of an opera) called Untrue Island which is about/inspired by Orford Ness. The Libretto was included in an event called 'On Location'  exploring British landscapes in words, sound and film.

The libretto is essentially the voices of the Ness, formed by its history and location through time, and the idea that it is the history and location that shapes the experience at Orford Ness.

Macfarlane has tried to uncover the many languages of the Ness: the specialist dialects (military-technological, ornithological, geological, conservationist) that it has generated; the many voices (human, avian, mineral) with which it seems to speak.

 "it speaks gull, it speaks wave, it speaks rust, it speaks lichen."

The Ness was an MOD site, where the 'physics of death' were practiced. This is remembered in the crumbling outbuildings, bunkers and watch towers. This reminds of the brutal, secret past of this site but also, now that these buildings are crumbling, enhances the sense of the power of the landscape to reclaim, and the ghosts of the previous uses remain.

The site is now under the National Trust - but still seems to feel militarised due to the Trusts policy of controlled ruination. If something breaks or rusts, they let it.

'The splintered, the fissile, the ruderal: these are the Ness's textures.'

The Ness is also a wild place.  The front-line North sea: big storms in winter. The landscape a mixtre of  mudflat, salt marsh, grassland and shingle. With much wildlife living on its rich muds.

The Ness, like other east coast spits (Spurn Head, Blakeney Point, Dungeness), is a dynamic structure. Created and shaped by tide, current, shore-drift and weather.

It is an eerie and intricate landscape in which the military and the natural combine, collide and confuse.

The descriptions of the site by Macfarlane are very poetic but are easy to imagine as true, 'brambles coil and loop like barbed wire. Orange lichen camouflages the concrete of pill-boxes.'

It is a place of strange juxtapositions and encryptions - although im not sure i like the work as it seems a bit twee and obvious.