Suffolk Walking Festival - Orford Ness

This was something I had wanted to do for quite some time - to visit the mysterious Orford Ness. And here was a chance - Walk 70 of the Suffolk Walking Festival.

Fortunately, I bought my ticket before it was sold out.

Orford Ness is Europe's largest vegetated shingle spit and is approximately 10 miles long,  40% of the area  is shingle, 25% is tidal rivers, mud flats, sand flats, and lagoons, 18%  grassland, and 15% salt marsh. Orford Ness is now owned by the National Trust and is open to the public under the name Orford Ness National Nature Reserve, though access is strictly controlled to protect the fragile habitats and due to a residual danger to the public from the site's former use by the military. Access is therefore only available by the National Trust ferry from Orford Quay on designated open days

It  also has an interesting history. The peninsula was formerly administered by the Ministry of Defence, which conducted secret military tests during both world wars and the Cold War. As a result, it was closed to the public for many decades.

We met at the quay and were taken across to the Ness by the ferry.

Our ranger guide was David Mason, who has worked on Orford Ness since 2011.

This was the route of our walk. We did a lot of, but not all of, the Red walk

Here are a few photos from along the way.

David telling us about the bird-life we could see on the marshes.

The grazing marsh.

We saw plenty of birds, including avocets, lapwings, oystercatchers, wheatears and skylarks. From the tuft, I think this is a spoonbill.

This is one of the pagodas. See here for more about the history of the AWRE on Orford Ness. Unfortunately they are deemed to unsafe to visit, and we didn't do the complete Red Trail, so we only saw them from a distance.

 

Looking back towards Orford across the marsh.

There a flock of sheep kept on the island, consisting of a number of different breeds. We were treated to a demonstration of sheep-shearing by Andrew, the shepherd..

The views are very wide and the sky is huge.

We passed some of the buildings on the island, but others we saw only from a distance, such as The Black Beacon...

...and Cobra Mist, originally the site of an experimental Anglo-American military over-the-horizon radar.

...with a couple of Oystercatchers spotted at the edge of the water.

Looking the other way we could see the buildings on the shingle.

The swathes of sea thrift and white campion were lovely.

Now we were on the shingle and the buildings looked even more mysterious.

We headed to the lighthouse...

...across the shingle, with warnign snot to stray off the path in case we got blown up by unexploded bombs.

We saw a Chinese wate deer in teh distance, but it disappeared before I could get a photo. We also saw some hares haring across the shingle. This one was sitting quietly waiting for us to pass trying to hide behind a block of concrete.

It is an extraordinary landscape.

We neared the lighthouse, whcih is no longer operational and in danger of slipping into the see in teh next few years.

The view along the beach past the derelict old coastguard lookout.

We returned the way we came.

Back by the Rangers' Office we spotted Anna McGowan, part of the team that organised the festival doing her volunteering duties on Orford Ness taking the fleeces from the shorn sheep to pack them up.

We took a little detour on the way back to briefly visit the exhibition in the Receiver building. It has several display panels explaining the work of the AWRE here on Orford Ness, including the fuselage of one the types of bomb they were testing.

From here we had a good view back over the marshes to Orford.

Our final delight was the view of a Barn Owl hunting.

Then it was back on the ferry.

And on to The Jolly Sailor for lunch.

Thanks David for a very interesting tour. It is definitely worth coming again for a full day to see the rest of the Ness.

I took a lot more photos - you can see them all  here on Flickr and more details of our route here on MapMyWalk.