Hayden Thorpe pens a letter to Orford Ness — the mistake-riddled landscape which birthed his latest record.

_{Orford Ness, photographed by Gordon Joly, licensed via Creative Commons.}

I speak to you now as Shelley’s Frankenstein did the monster. A thing which I once perceived as a conglomerate of lifeless parts, I surely now recognise as bearing the soul of a sentient being. You dear Ness, are a creature.

Perhaps we should look upon our landscapes as a collective doppelgänger, for they seemingly endure the same arbitrary cruelties and protections that we do. Ness, your dark pasts are a direct reflection of what we have done. You are riddled in mistakes, appalling intentions and fiendish action. Your scars bear the hallmarks of power’s brutal tendency to simply beget more power. You are the mirror twin, the thing looking back at us. A shadow tyrant within — the thing we don’t want to see.

Today you are in a state of healing, a redemption story being told. Perhaps for this reason, you are kin for the dislocated and the estranged. A place devoid of judgement. That I found belonging on your off-grid wilds would be in keeping with those who have done so across millennia. I had underestimated the attachment that would form when devoting years of my working life to capturing your siren song. I did not know, dear creature, that by lending a voice to your lands the sheer collective life-force throbbing forth in feather, in gust, in terror and in love would all impart itself on the work.

I arrived here as people do into a new city — haunted by the place I had just left. A little disenchanted and therefore a little lonely, but glad for it. In a state too vulnerable to let suspicion overwhelm what might be next. I’ve come to think that this sense of belonging, which I found with you Ness, is surely as much a human need as love. I would go so far as to say that the feeling of belonging is a facet of sentience. Perhaps there isn’t any form of consciousness found in plant, animal or person which can fully co-ordinate without a patch of belonging on this planet.

Often now, I act as tour guide to your new visitors, who may themselves go on to form such belongings. I tell these curious folk about the poetic justice playing out on your lands;

“Here is where the scientists and physicists invented radar and camouflage, this is where they first strapped bombs to planes and this is where the delivery systems for nuclear weapons were perfected to ensure maximum destruction, optimum kill.”

There is a nuclear bomb kept at your heart place. WE177A, an angel-white missile which once carried an atomic payload 20 times more powerful than that which was dropped on Nagasaki. I convert the disturbed expression worn on visitor’s faces by joking about health and safety protocol requiring the missile be decommissioned.

Your crown jewel lay upon on a gurney as if resting in state. An inverse corpse — not bereft of life but an object without the potential for death. This spectre of apocalyptic violence housed in a groundkeeper’s shed, beside cans of WD40 and a cachet of odd screws. Oh, to be the right side of our civilisation’s jinx and greet this ornamental Godhead with a smile.

Consider will you Ness, how during the early Holocene you were directly connected to the European mainland. Mesolithic people were able to simply walk across the chalk land-bridge where a deep sea now divides. A murmuration of cultures, warping with the wind. Not yet beholden to a set of stories that would later become maps, that then became countries whose borders when breached, would bring about war. I spoke about you Ness, in Germany and in Northern Ireland, places where the hubris and flag wagging so prone to the British conflict story is more muted. In its place, among many, a solemn knowledge of what is at stake.

Orford Ness, the Bardo of Britain — you must make a choice as to your next incarnation. There are Polish pilots buried in the village church yard where I will soon perform. Their headstones speak to the last time such boundaries were breached and in turn desperately defended. Events that tilted us over the edge, so far as to be able to see the syrupy lava of hell coagulating beneath.

Polish and British pilots flew together again of late, defending de-humanised drones which are surely the bastard-offspring of what was conceived with you Ness. You are the cradle of a paranoid future within which we now live. Even the modest profits of this album will be reinvested by some parties into AI weaponry. Songs of peace about an ex-weapons development site being converted back into weapons. Cosmic fuckery so bizarre that the effect is almost numbing. It begs the question; what will the songs at the end of the world sound like?

Perhaps we’re singing them? Perhaps we won’t hear them.

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Hayden Thorpe performs Song of Ness, featuring Robert Macfarlane & Propellor Ensemble, at the Barbican next week — part of the venue’s Fragile Earth concert series, which runs until March 2026. We have a pair of tickets to give away on this afternoon’s newsletter; make sure you’re signed up to the mailing list for entry details.