What really went on at Britain’s Bikini Atoll?

Nearly a century ago, some Chinese water deer swam the River Ore to Orford Ness. They had escaped from the ornamental deer park at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire and, perhaps through ancestral homing instinct, headed as far east as possible without falling into the North Sea. They climbed unsteadily on to this strange shingle spit at the end of England and made it home, along with the gulls, thistles, wild poppies and the brown hares who, reportedly, are too burly to be airlifted by the Ness’s marsh harriers and barn owls.

The pioneering deers’ descendants have borne witness since to many faces of human folly. From the first world war to the end of the Cold War, the Ness was home to experiments with airborne weaponry, radar and atom bombs. What Nevada and Bikini Atoll were to the Americans, Orford Ness was to Britain. In the 1950s newspapers and locals were told misleading stories that the scientific work done here had merely civil purpose, namely to aid merchant vessels so that they didn’t run aground on the Ness.