Orfordness Lighthouse

The Orfordness Rotating Wireless Beacon, known simply as the Orfordness Beacon or sometimes the Black Beacon, was an early radio navigation system introduced by the United Kingdom in July 1929. It allowed the angle to the station to be measured from any aircraft or ship with a conventional radio receiver, and was accurate to about a degree. A second station operating on the same principle was set up to provide wider area coverage and allow two-bearing fixes between Orford Ness and Farnborough Airport. The system was similar to the earlier German Telefunken Kompass Sender and the later Sonne system.

Orford Ness is a cuspate foreland shingle spit on the Suffolk coast in Great Britain, linked to the mainland at Aldeburgh and stretching along the coast to Orford and down to North Weir Point, opposite Shingle Street. It is divided from the mainland by the River Alde, and was formed by longshore drift along the coast. The material of the spit comes from places further north, such as Dunwich. Near the middle point of its length, at the foreland point or 'Ness', once stood Orfordness Lighthouse, demolished in summer 2020 owing to the encroaching sea. In the name of the lighthouse (and the radio transmitting station – see below), 'Orfordness' is written as one word.

The Orfordness transmitting station was a major radio broadcasting facility at Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast in the United Kingdom able to broadcast to much of Europe. It closed in May 2012 after more than 30 years of service. In 2017 Radio Caroline started broadcasting from the site, though not with the same intended coverage of an audience in Europe as the original station. The station was designed to transmit powerful medium wave (AM) signals to much of Europe on two frequencies, 648 and 1296 kHz. Built by the British government, the facility passed through various owners after privatisation in 1997. From 2010, it was owned by a large engineering and defence services company, the Babcock International Group. The current owner of the site is a telecommunications company called Cobra Mist Limited, set up in 2015.Over the years, the Orfordness station carried a variety of radio services. It was best known, particularly in the UK, for transmitting the BBC World Service in English around the clock on 648 kHz from September 1982 until March 2011. The station's name is written as one word while that of the shingle spit on which it sits is two words.

Cobra Mist was the codename for an Anglo-American experimental over-the-horizon radar station at Orford Ness, England. It was known technically as AN/FPS-95 and sometimes referred to as System 441a; a reference to the project as a whole. Cobra Mist was part of a small number of "Cobra" long-range surveillance radars operated by the US. Cobra Mist was originally intended to be mounted in Turkey and to offer coverage of most of European Soviet airspace. When Turkey objected to the installation, it was moved to the UK and sited to offer a view of most of Eastern Europe. Built through the late 1960s and into 1970, when the system was first turned on it proved to be plagued by noise problems that could not be identified, and the project was shut down in 1973. The site and buildings were then occupied by a radio transmitting station used mainly for the UK Foreign Office and the BBC World Service until 2011. In August 2015, the site and all the facilities previously held by the UK Foreign Office and the BBC (and prior to them the Ministry of Defence) were acquired by Cobra Mist Limited, a privately owned company. The main building and 12 towers remain. Five are 340 feet high.

Hollesley Bay is a bay on the coast of Suffolk, England, near the village of Hollesley. Nelson brought his fleet here in 1801.

The Church of St Bartholomew is the parish church of the town of Orford, England. A medieval church, dating from the fourteenth century, with reconstructions in the nineteenth and twentieth century, it is a Grade I listed building. In addition to its listing, the church is notable as the location for the first performances of four of the works of the composer Benjamin Britten: Noye's Fludde, Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son.

Orford is a village in Suffolk, England, within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is 9 miles (14 km) east of Woodbridge.

Valley Farm Pit, Sudbourne is a 0.5-hectare (1.2-acre) geological Site of Special Scientific Interest north of Orford in Suffolk. It is a Geological Conservation Review site, and in the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.A shelly, fossilerous Pleistocene layer lies unconformably above a Pliocene Coralline Crag Formation layer. It is described by Natural England as important both for sedimentological studies and for understanding the local relationship between the Pliocene and the Pleistocene.The site is private land with no public access.

Crag Farm Pit, Sudbourne is a 4.8-hectare (12-acre) geological Site of Special Scientific Interest east of Sudbourne in Suffolk. It is a Geological Conservation Review site, and within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.This site dates to the early Pliocene, around four million years ago. It is described by Natural England as an important geological site, which has the best exposure of sandwave facies of the Coralline Crag Formation. Fossils of many bryozoan species are present.The site has been filled in and is now a field. It is on private land with no public access.

Orford Castle is a castle in Orford in the English county of Suffolk, 12 miles (19 km) northeast of Ipswich, with views over Orford Ness. It was built between 1165 and 1173 by Henry II of England to consolidate royal power in the region. The well-preserved keep, described by historian R. Allen Brown as "one of the most remarkable keeps in England", is of a unique design and probably based on Byzantine architecture. The keep stands within the earth-bank remains of the castle's outer fortifications.

Captain's Wood is a 62 hectare nature reserve in Sudbourne in Suffolk. It is owned and managed by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust.This site has woodland, rough grassland and scrub. A herd of fallow deer helps to keep the land open, and there are also barn owls, buzzards, mature oak trees and many bluebells.There is access from School Road.

The Coralline Crag Formation is a geological formation in England. It is a series of marine deposits found near the North Sea coast of Suffolk and characterised by bryozoan and mollusc debris. The deposit, whose onshore occurrence is mainly restricted to the area around Aldeburgh and Orford, is a series of bioclastic calcarenites and silty sands with shell debris, deposited during a short-lived warm period at the start of the Pliocene Epoch of the Neogene Period. Small areas of the rock formation are found in locations such as Boyton and Tattingstone to the south of Orford as well as offshore at Sizewell.Crag is a local word for a shelly sand. Coralline Crag has sometimes been used historically in the Suffolk coast area for building and a number of quarries exist. The tower of St Peter's Church in Chillesford is one of only two built using the rock.