Orford Ness is a narrow shingle and marsh spit off the Suffolk coastline that “speaks gull, speaks wave, speaks bracken & lapwing, speaks bullet, ruin, gale, deception”. Now a nature reserve, it was previously the site of secret military activity from the first world war onwards, and retains the squat concrete structures that were used for military testing during the cold war.
Narrated with great seriousness and portent by actor Stephen Dillane, Ness – a collaboration between nature writer Robert Macfarlane and artist Stanley Donwood – is a wonderfully weird prose poem and ecological parable in which a group of scientists including the Armourer, the Physicist, the Engineer and the Ornithologist gather at the decaying concrete Green Chapel. There they sing a hymn of ruination called “The Firing Song” and plot the end of the world. Meanwhile, five natural forces called “it”, “he”, “she”, “they” and “us” converge on the chapel to reclaim the land and avert catastrophe. “She” comprises lichen, moss and fungi; “it” is drift, with plastic bones and a body of pallet slat and bottle tops held together with fishing line.
