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Orford Ness in Suffolk is a WEIRD place! It’s probably the only National Trust site which has signs warning about unexploded bombs and keeping to the path…OR ELSE!
It’s only reached by taking a little boat across – and then the visitor is faced with an area of bleakness, strangeness and abandoned buildings just hinting at what went on here in times gone by – but still very much in living memory.
Its history goes back a long way, but in the Cold War this was one of the most secret places in Britain. It’s where Britain’s nuclear bombs were tested – not by exploding them but by testing them to destruction to see if they were up to the job of getting to the skies above the Soviet Union in a Valiant, Vulcan or Victor bomber and surviving the fall onto whatever was their chosen target.
That, at least, is what we’re told about Orford Ness now…
…but the site is very much the sort of place where what is UNtold is very much as intriguing and what is now known about what really went on here. This place really is the very definition of “hidden history”.
GALLERY: CLICK ON THE IMAGES BELOW TO SEE MORE FROM ORFORD NESS
Suffice to say, Orford Ness has a certain bleak beauty about it – with these forbidding, decaying and strange structures dotted around seemingly randomly while all the time it’s clear they had a real and, one assumes, vital role to play in ensuring that if the Cold War turned into a hot one, then Britain could take that war to the enemy.
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