Orford Ness and W.G. Sebald

It'll cost you £8 (£4 for children) to visit Orford Ness. This covers the one minute boat trip to get to the shingle spit. If you want a day's walking in a strange and  foreboding place, I highly recommend it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orford_Ness

Take a packed lunch - there's no sustenance to be found once you're there, and there's a  choice of walks, although they can depend on the time of year. Visiting details:

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/orford-ness/

If you are after a feeling of 'otherness' then this is the place for you. Weird structures, bits of battered metal and shrapnel randomly strewn about, defunct military signs, odd buildings with historical information. For years it was the place for secretive military experiments and out of bounds.

W.G. Sebald writes about it in his wonderful book The Rings of Saturn. This is like no other book I've read (until I read his other ones, that is!). Sebald, before his death in 2001, was a German Professor of Literature at the U.E.A. in Norwich. The book is essentially about his walks through the Suffolk countryside, but is so much more than that. He readily goes off at tangents, refracting his topics, and musing on life. He writes about Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, the Chinese opium wars, the British silk industry, the Temple of Jerusalem and Kurt Waldheim (though not by name):
 'A deserted beach reveals the abandoned hulk of a research center used by British military intelligence for the development of bombing technology. Most tellingly, an idle glance through the pages of a London newspaper turns up a nightmarish photo of the Ustasha, the Croatian fascists who murdered thousands of Jews, Serbs and Bosnians. They did so under the watchful eye of their Nazi allies including, as Sebald drily notes, a young officer named Kurt Waldheim, who would later occupy “various high offices, among them that of Secretary General of the United Nations.”'

(http://www.thejewishweek.com/arts/film/sebald_dont_put_me_box)

It's part philosophical work, part travel book, part history, part biography, part autobiography.  It has an elegiac, melancholy feel. Lots of what he comes across during his Suffolk walks is symbolically in decline, or decaying, or dead, whether it be the cliffs at Dunwich, the fishing industry in Lowestoft, the Southwold railway or indeed Orford Ness. Sebald has become, over the last fifteen years, an influential figure in literature, art, and history. In common with his other books, what he really writes about is loss, displacement, detachment and the coming to terms with the catastrophe and fallout of Nazism.
Anything else you need to know you'll find here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jan/25/wg-sebald-suffolk-walk

http://sebald.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/w-g-sebald-melancholy-poet-travel-agent/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._G._Sebald 

http://underthought.wordpress.com/category/book-reviews/sebald-wg/

http://www.amazon.com/The-Rings-Saturn-W-G-Sebald/dp/081121413

The  humanitarian campaigner and an Irish patriot, poet, revolutionary & nationalist: 

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Casement

http://sebald.wordpress.com/2007/04/04/tacita-dean-and-wg-sebald/

There is a fine new documentary film on Sebald out this year too - Patience (after (Sebald) which recently showed at the Ipswich Film Theatre - lots of black & white footage of Suffolk locations and lots of snippets of interviews with people who knew or have been influenced by the man himself:

http://www.artevents.info/projects/current/the-re-enchantment/patience-after-sebald

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jan/29/patience-after-sebald-review

At Orford, waiting for the ferry:

On Orford Ness: