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This is the lighthouse on Orford Ness in Suffolk, a 16km long shingle spit created by longshore drift. It begins at the town of Aldeburgh and stretches down the coast to the hamlet of Shingle Street. Access now is only by boat. The ramshackle buildings in front of the lighthouse were once the old coastguard station. Orford Ness is a curious place, shrouded in secrecy from it's days belonging to the Ministry of Defence and used as a weapons research and testing site. A lot of stories that surround the area are apocryphal due to little hard evidence remaining; however it's true to say that Watson-Watt developed radar here. The various labs were used for either missile testing or testing the projectory of conventional missiles. In the main it was used for testing Blue Danube and, later, the WE177. Official reports deny it, but ex-workers from the site claim that the more recent labs, know locally as the pagodas, were used for testing Blue Streak. The site now belongs to the National Trust, and as well as being a place of one-time strategic military importance, also comprises 12% of the world's coastal vegetative habitat, with rare species of sea campion, vervain and sea asters amongst others. The National Trust are doing their best to maintain the extremely fragile ecology of the site and you can't just wander at will. Another reason for that is that there's still unexploded ordnance that keeps coming to the surface!
The lighthouse will be decommissioned next year, and in around five years it's expected to fall into the sea due to coastal erosion. However, before that happens there's a big task involved which is to extract the bed of mercury on which the light sits.
You can see the striations in the shingle between shingle and vegetation. Each line marks where the previous coast-line was as the shingle was built up. There'll be something like a hundred years between each one. In the days of Henry 11 the spit was very small, and the town of Orford was a major port with its harbour open to the sea.
Worth taking a guided tour.

These are the 'pagodas' (properly called laboratory 4 & 5) on Orford Ness in Suffolk, a long shingle spit, 16 km long. It begins in the town of Aldeburgh and reaches down the coast to the hamlet of Shingle Street. A curious place, shrouded in secrecy from it's days belonging to the Ministry of Defence and used as a weapons research and testing site. A lot of stories that surround the area are apocryphal due to little hard evidence remaining; however it's true to say that Watson-Watt developed radar here. The above labs were used for missile testing, in particular of the WE177 and possibly Polaris warheads. Official reports deny it, but ex-workers from the site claim that these labs were used for testing Blue Streak. The site now belongs to the National Trust, and as well as being a place of one-time strategic military importance, also comprises 12% of the world's coastal vegetative habitat. The National Trust are doing their best to maintain the extremely fragile ecology of the site and you can't just wander at will. Another reason for that is that there's still unexploded ordnance that keeps coming to the surface!
Worth taking a guided tour.