Category: Orford Ness

Orford Ness, a shingle spit off the coast of Suffolk in the south-east of England, had been a military testing and research site since just before WW1. But what makes the place most relevant to dark tourism is the legacy of its role in the Cold War as one of the main sites used by the so-called “Atomic Weapons Research Establishment” (AWRE) of the Ministry of Defence (MOD). Here all of the nuclear weapons developed by Britain were tested – not in the sense of actual nuclear tests (those were conducted in Australia, especially Maralinga, and later in the Pacific), but