2016.06.01自然与历史的竞争需求之间

shiyi18

On the front line of conservation
The battle between the competing demands of nature and history is being played out on Orford Ness, a remote spit of land on Britain’s eastern coastline. Martin Fletcher met the protagonists

Jun 1st 2016 (Updated Jun 13th 2016)

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By Martin Fletcher

Five thousand years ago the short, muddy River Alde flowed straight in to the North Sea, draining Suffolk’s coastal marshes. Then a spit began to form across its mouth, forcing the river to turn south. Over the centuries that spit lengthened as the tides sucked ever more shingle from the north. By the late Middle Ages it extended five miles down the coast, curtailing the sea trade of what was then the mildly prosperous port of Orford. Today Orford Ness, as it is called, is fully ten miles long – a broad spine of shingle confronting the ocean with a soft underbelly of marshes flanking the river.

Nobody lives on the Ness, which barely rises above sea level. No trees grow there. On a hot summer’s day, beneath a vast East Anglian sky, it can be exhilaratingly beautiful with a lazy blue sea to the east and, across the river, the Norman castle and red-tiled roofs of picturesque Orford ringed by lush green countryside. But at other times it appears a bleak and desolate wasteland, pounded by waves, lashed by rain, flayed by icy winds, its desolation compounded by the sinister remains of the top-secret military experiments that the government conducted there throughout much of the 20th century.


Six huge concrete bunkers, their walls protected by steep banks of shingle, stand silhouetted against the sky like strange Chinese pagodas or prehistoric burial mounds. A grey, windowless monolith of a building rests on stilts in the marshes like a stranded battleship. Elsewhere on the stony flats there are crumbling concrete tracks, stunted towers, brick huts in various states of disrepair, the foundations of long-razed buildings, rows of fence-less posts and mysterious fragments of rusting steel. A pair of narrow gauge railway lines vanish beneath the pebbles. Brambles coil and curl like the barbed wire they replaced. A red-and-white lighthouse is less forbidding, but stands perilously close to the eroding shore.



Flood of information The remaining antennae from the failed Cobra Mist radar station from the late 1960s were flooded in December 2015. Top The roofs of the pagodas on the eastern shore were designed to collapse during an accident, sealing inside any nuclear debris.
The Ness was on the front line, literally and figuratively, of the three great conflicts that shaped the last century – the two world wars and the cold war. Arguably it contributed as much to Britain’s survival as Bletchley Park, for it was here that the government developed bombs, radar and nuclear weapons.

Today the Ness is run by the National Trust. A place once dedicated to destruction has become a flagship of conservation, a haven for birds and other wildlife. It is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, a National Nature Reserve, a Ramsar-designated wetland site and much else besides. As such it is the scene of a subtler, peculiarly 21st-century conflict of a type that is increasingly common as populations swell and land becomes more precious. It is a struggle between competing demands: the conservation of one of southern Britain’s last significant tracts of wild land on one hand and the preservation of history on the other.


Two men embody those differing priorities. One is Grant Lohoar, a gruff and somewhat reticent former farmer who has managed the Ness for the trust for the past 22 years and is fiercely protective of the place. The other is Nicholas Gold, the enterprising, extrovert and strong-willed son of a Suffolk parson who made his money as a corporate lawyer in London before retiring to Orford to paint.

After a century in which locals have been largely excluded from the land that divides them from the sea, Gold wants them to be able to use and enjoy it again. To the trust’s consternation, he has bought two remarkable buildings on the Ness: the 224-year old lighthouse and that great, grey excrescence in the marshes which is, in fact, an American cold-war-era radar station codenamed Cobra Mist. Those purchases give Gold a substantial say in its future.



Room without a view Nicholas Gold in the cavernous halls of his Cobra Mist radar station
Long ago Orford’s menfolk would row across the narrow river to hunt wildfowl on the Ness. They collected oysters from its muddy creeks and gulls’ eggs from its marshes. After those marshes were drained in Henry II’s time they grazed sheep and cattle there. A few engaged in smuggling, even piracy.

Ships were regularly wrecked in the treacherous waters off the coast – 32 in a single stormy night in 1627. A succession of rudimentary wooden lighthouses burned down, or fell into the sea, until the present one was erected in 1792. Bones, shoes, ships’ timbers and metalwork still occasionally wash ashore after storms.

Public access to what locals call “the island” ended when the first world war erupted in 1914. The War Office wanted somewhere flat, empty and far from prying eyes. Orford was 12 miles by winding country lane from Woodbridge, the nearest town of any size, so it commandeered the Ness.

Signs were erected, warning trespassers of prosecution. Huge amounts of material were shipped over from Orford’s quay, along with cheap Chinese labourers and, later, German prisoners -of-war who built sea defences, airstrips and hangars. In those early years the Royal Flying Corps, forerunner of the Royal Air Force, used the Ness to test its first planes, and to develop bomb sights, aerial photography, night flying, parachutes, fireproof fuel tanks and much else besides.

All military work finally ceased in the 1970s, save that of the raf bomb disposal squads charged with recovering thousands of tonnes of unexploded ordnance. The Central Electricity Generating Board briefly considered building a nuclear power station there, but opted for Sizewell just up the coast. Scrap-metal merchants and vandals moved in until the National Trust acquired the Ness in 1993.

The trust has no other property like it. There is no café for tea, no gift shop selling jams and pot-pourri, little shelter. Signs warn of unexploded bombs, and it can be an eerie, uncomfortable place to visit. “It’s almost like all the things that happened here, and all the people who worked here, are still present in some way,” Lohoar says as he gives me a tour of the Ness one blustery morning. “It’s certainly a place that polarises opinions. People love it or hate it. They have very strong opinions about the ethics and morals of what was done here. They have strong opinions about how it should be managed or left alone.”



Landscape guard The National Trust’s Grant Lohoar is focused on protecting the Ness’s natural history
We visit the six huge bunkers. These, Lohoar explains, are where the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment tested the complex, high-explosive detonators of Britain’s nuclear weapons during the 1950s and 1960s by subjecting them to extreme temperatures, violent shocks and intense vibration. “Officially there was never any fissile material on Orford Ness,” he says, “but you pays your money and takes your choice on that one.”

Lohoar unlocks the padlocked gates and takes me inside. The “labs” are mere shells. Their steel girders are corroding, the concrete is crumbling and the fittings were long ago plundered, leaving empty halls and curious pits. “Anything to do with their function has been robbed, but their real importance is as symbols,” he says. “They represent the cold war and mad (Mutually Assured Destruction). They represent a period in our history where civilisation could have ended itself.”


Elsewhere on the Ness we climb up metal steps to the roof of a building where scientists once measured the ballistic properties of prototype bombs as they fell. Over many decades munitions of every shape and size were tested on the Ness, and craters are still visible in the shingle. Bombs and shells still turn up in the marshes, or wash up on the beach. Even now, Lohoar has to summon bomb disposal experts every few months.

What else happened on the Ness may never be known. Too much is covered by the Official Secrets Act, or was concealed by official disinformation. Those who worked there are mostly dead, will not talk, or operated on a need-to-know basis. “There are key people whose stories we would like to get on tape but they won’t do it,” says Lohoar, who used to stare across at the Ness when he was a young farmer and wonder what was happening. Even relatives who worked there would not tell him.

One recurrent tale is of a wall of burning petroleum, fuelled by underwater pipes, that allegedly killed either a German invasion force or a team of English sappers off the Ness’s southern tip during the second world war and left their bodies strewn across the beach.

It is a fact, however, that a tiny team of scientists led by Robert Watson-Watt raced to develop Radio Direction Finding, now known as radar, on the Ness before the second world war. “Very interesting, young man, but time for lunch now,” the minister for war declared when Watson-Watt showed him a blip miraculously tracking a distant aircraft for the first time. In the event, the boffins’ success gave allied pilots a priceless advantage over their German counterparts in the 1940 Battle of Britain.

Decades later Watson-Watt was caught speeding by a radar gun in Canada and wrote: “Pity poor Sir Watson-Watt/Strange target of his radar plot/And thus with others I could mention/A victim of his own invention.”



Tilting at windmills Known on the Ness as the Black Beacon, this rotating wireless beacon was an early radio navigation system introduced in July 1929
The Ness’s military history is fascinating, but Lohoar is keener to show me its natural history. From the top of the so-called Bomb Ballistics Building we enjoy a commanding view of the spit, and he points to diagonal ridges that traverse the shingle as if scored by a giant plough. He explains how each was the crest of an ancient beach formed by storms as the Ness stretched southwards – the littoral equivalent of the rings of a tree. Nothing grows in the furrows, he continues, but over hundreds of years rare lichens and other vegetation have established themselves on the ridge tops where smaller stones offer more protection.

The Ness is not obviously beautiful like the Lake District, he concedes, but it is “absolutely special ecologically”. It is Europe’s finest vegetated shingle spit, one of its rarest habitats, and extraordinarily fragile. If people walk on it, he warns, it will never recover. “It’s irreversible. It will never come back.”

In similar vein, Lohoar extols the wealth of birds on the Ness – the breeding birds and waders, the avocets, marsh harriers, redshanks, lapwings, godwits, golden plovers, ruffs, spoonbills, warblers, stonechats, kestrel, barn and short-eared owls. He explains how easily ground-nesting birds are disturbed by humans in such an open, exposed environment, and how predators steal their eggs if they leave their nests. Stoats, weasels, brown hares, voles and rather too many egg-stealing foxes also flourish on the Ness.

For these and other reasons – safety, the ferry-only access, a desire to preserve the sense of wildness and isolation – the National Trust restricts visitors to 156 a day on a limited number of days per year and not Sundays or bank holidays. It does little to advertise the Ness. No road signs point the way to it. It has scarcely 8,000 visitors a year, fewer than one of the trust’s great country houses would attract on a summer weekend. “We have to allow access, but not so many it becomes a problem,” Lohoar argues.

Broadly speaking, the trust’s policy towards the Ness is one of “controlled ruination” or “managed retreat” – in layman’s terms, letting nature take its course. In the case of the six bunkers, it means allowing them to crumble. Only one is still considered safe enough for the public to approach unsupervised, and restoring them would be prohibitively expensive. With walls up to ten feet thick and roofs weighing 1,500 tonnes or more, demolishing them is not an option either.

That approach protects the trust’s finances as well as the non-human species on the Ness. But it has fuelled tensions between Lohoar and his nemesis, Nick Gold.



The dock of the bay Much of the old military hardware has been allowed to decay
In 2011 Trinity House offered the trust the decommissioned lighthouse, which was threatened by the eroding shore. The trust refused, though the 98-foot tower was a Grade II listed building and a Suffolk landmark with spectacular views and a colourful history. The trust argued that erecting sea defences to protect the lighthouse would accelerate erosion elsewhere and, in any case, be futile. As Lohoar put it: “If there’s a fight between us and the North Sea we know who’s going to win.”

Gold took the opposite view. For years he had admired the lighthouse from across the river in Orford. He wanted to save it – and let local people enjoy it – for as long as possible. He duly bought it for £2,000 plus various liabilities, and with it a right of way across trust property from the landing jetty. “Some people prefer a new model Range Rover. I prefer a lighthouse. It’s more interesting than a swanky car in the drive,” he says.


In defiance of the trust, Gold has since sandbagged the shore around the lighthouse’s base to preserve it a little longer, opened it to visitors for virtually the first time in its history, and even held summer concerts there. He makes no money from the building. On the contrary, he says it costs him a lot to maintain. But he describes saving it as one of his three most rewarding achievements – alongside the flotation of Reuters, when he acted for the news agency’s owners, and restoring the finances of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, on whose board he sat for nine years.

He likes to show off the lighthouse, and on New Year’s Day 190 locals walked across the Ness for a glass of mulled wine there. “Everyone loves lighthouses,” he says. “Two or three thousand people have visited it. We just can’t satisfy demand. We could treble that figure easily if we had enough volunteers.”

Last summer Gold bought Cobra Mist, the over-the-horizon radar station built by the us government in 1967 to monitor missile and rocket launches in the Soviet Union. At today’s prices, the cost of construction was more than £1 billion. Some 750,000 tonnes of material were shipped over to the Ness.

Outside its thick steel walls a gigantic fan-shaped spider’s web of towering antennae, covering 135 acres, faced towards Moscow. According to local lore, Russian “trawlers” bristling with aerials moored off the Suffolk coast.

Lohoar claims two Russian “ornithologists” with high-powered binoculars were arrested on top of Orford Castle. But Cobra Mist was shut down within six years. Some say it never worked properly; others that it was superseded by spy satellites or that it was a victim of superpower arms negotiations. Thereafter the bbc World Service used the building to broadcast to eastern Europe until 2011.

Gold will not divulge what he paid Babcock International, a defence contractor, for the building and all its contents, but he also took on what he calls “very significant liabilities” – and another acrimonious dispute with the trust.

In 1998, in accordance with its policy of managed retreat, the trust deliberately omitted to repair the wall protecting the Lantern Marshes at the northern end of the Ness from the river. That may have been ecologically desirable, but in the Great Surge of December 2013, water broke through an inner wall that protected Cobra Mist, flooding the land all around.



Muddy waters The hulk of Cobra Mist rising out of the flooded flatland
Gold took me there one spring morning. We needed a tractor and trailer to get through the flood. Outside, the spooky, windowless cold-war relic was ringed by masts and floodlights protruding from the waters. Inside, it resembled the abandoned set of “Dr Strangelove”.

Gold led me through Cobra Mist’s cavernous halls – mostly now empty except for one that was filled with huge grey transmitters. He showed me an old glass-fronted control centre, rooms within rooms to thwart electronic eavesdropping, inner sanctums with beryllium-coated steel doors and handles on the inside only.

We followed labyrinthine passages to offices with fading maps of Europe on the walls, tool shops, a canteen, a recreation room, a sick bay. We found old filing cabinets and packing cases stuffed with who knows what. We saw internal staircases descending into the murky flood waters below. We had to explore the upper level with torches because it had not been used since 1973 and the electricity was turned off long ago, making it eerier still.

“It’s a folly of grandiose proportions but I like eccentric buildings, I really do,” Gold replied when asked why he bought it. Cobra Mist – like the lighthouse – is a valuable local asset, he explained. He hopes to use it to create local employment. A super-fast broadband operator has already erected a mast on the roof, and Gold hopes a mobile telephone operator will soon follow (Orford still has no mobile signal). He has been approached by production companies interested in using the building as a film set, by a radio station that wants to broadcast to the Netherlands, and by the developers of a huge new offshore wind farm needing a communications hub. He believes Cobra Mist would be ideal as a data centre, and that the surrounding land could be used for a solar farm, because it still has high capacity links to the national grid from its days as Europe’s biggest radar station.

Gold has been a member of the National Trust for 30 years. Like Lohoar, he says he loves the wildness of the Ness – “a beautiful spooky place” – and has no intention of “opening it up to the hordes”. But he does not accept that land that was bombed for half a century can be so delicate: “The fact that it doesn’t appear to be in too bad order speaks for itself.” He does not believe that the Ness’s sea and river defences should be left to deteriorate. He does not agree that its flora and fauna should be prioritised. He contends that “the trust’s ‘keep out’ policy is taken to extremes”, and that local people should enjoy much greater access to – and benefit from – a spit from which they were barred for most of the 20th century.

There have been some heated disputes between Gold and the trust in the past three years: over use of the jetty, alleged harassment by trust employees of visitors to the lighthouse, and over the flooding of Cobra Mist. Gold has not hesitated to use his legal prowess to assert his rights – tabling critical motions at the National Trust’s annual general meeting, unearthing old contracts to show that the trust was obliged to maintain the river defences, and threatening to sue if it did not reverse the flooding of his property.

A fragile ceasefire has now taken hold. The two parties recently settled their dispute over the flooding on terms which – like so much else on the Ness – remain secret. Both Gold and Lohoar talk of the need to co-operate. But given their different goals it will not be easy. Any relationship is likely to resemble that of the sea and the Ness itself: a low-level war of attrition, an endless cycle of advances and retreats that constantly reshapes this curious strip of land.

photographs simon norfolk



在保护的前线
自然与历史的竞争需求之间的斗争正在奥福德尼斯上演，这是英国东部海岸线上的一块偏远土地。马丁-弗莱彻见到了这些主角们

2016年6月1日（2016年6月13日更新）。


作者：马丁-弗莱彻

五千年前，短小、泥泞的阿尔德河直接流向北海，将萨福克的沿海沼泽地排干。后来，河口开始形成一个海口，迫使河流转向南方。几个世纪以来，随着潮汐从北方吸走越来越多的碎石，这条水口也随之延长。到了中世纪晚期，它沿着海岸延伸了5英里，限制了当时温和繁荣的奥福德港的海上贸易。今天，奥福德尼斯，就像它的名字一样，足足有10英里长--一条宽阔的脊柱，面对着大海，下面是柔软的沼泽地，在河的两侧。

没有人住在尼斯，它几乎不高于海平面。那里没有树木生长。在炎热的夏天，在东安格利亚广阔的天空下，它可以是令人振奋的美丽，东面是慵懒的蓝色大海，河对面是诺曼底城堡和风景如画的奥福德的红瓦屋顶，周围是郁郁葱葱的乡村。但在其他时候，它似乎是一片凄凉的荒地，被海浪拍打，被雨水冲刷，被冰冷的风剥落，它的荒凉因政府在20世纪大部分时间里在这里进行的绝密军事试验的险恶遗迹而变得更加复杂。


六个巨大的混凝土碉堡，它们的墙壁被陡峭的沙石岸保护着，在天空中的剪影就像奇怪的中国宝塔或史前的坟冢。一座灰色的、没有窗户的建筑物就像一艘搁浅的战舰一样在沼泽地的高跷上。在其他地方的石滩上，有摇摇欲坠的混凝土轨道、发育不良的塔楼、处于各种失修状态的砖屋、长期荒废的建筑物的地基、一排排没有栅栏的柱子和生锈的钢铁的神秘碎片。一对窄轨铁路消失在鹅卵石下。荆棘像它们所取代的带刺铁丝一样盘绕和卷曲。一座红白相间的灯塔不那么令人生畏，但却危险地矗立在侵蚀的海岸边。



洪水的信息 20世纪60年代末失败的眼镜蛇雾状雷达站的剩余天线在2015年12月被洪水淹没。顶部 东部海岸的宝塔的屋顶被设计成在事故发生时坍塌，将任何核碎片密封在里面。
尼斯在塑造上个世纪的三大冲突--两次世界大战和冷战--的前线，无论从字面上还是从形象上看，都是如此。可以说，它对英国的生存所做的贡献不亚于布莱切利公园，因为正是在这里，政府开发了炸弹、雷达和核武器。

今天，尼斯由国民信托组织管理。一个曾经致力于破坏的地方已经成为保护的旗舰，成为鸟类和其他野生动物的天堂。它是一个具有特殊科学价值的地点，一个国家自然保护区，一个拉姆萨尔指定的湿地，以及其他许多地方。因此，它是一个更微妙的、21世纪特有的冲突的现场，这种冲突随着人口的膨胀和土地变得更加珍贵而越来越常见。这是一场相互竞争的需求之间的斗争：一方面是保护英国南部最后一块重要的野生土地，另一方面是保护历史。


有两个人体现了这些不同的优先事项。一个是格兰特-罗霍尔（Grant Lohoar），一个粗暴且有点沉默寡言的前农民，在过去的22年里为信托公司管理尼斯河，对这个地方有强烈的保护。另一位是尼古拉斯-戈德，他是萨福克郡牧师的儿子，积极进取、性格外向、意志坚强，在伦敦做企业律师时赚了不少钱，后来退休到奥福德作画。

一个世纪以来，当地人在很大程度上被排斥在这片将他们与大海隔开的土地之外，戈尔德希望他们能够再次使用和享受这片土地。在信托基金的惊愕中，他买下了尼斯河上的两座非凡的建筑：有224年历史的灯塔和沼泽地里巨大的灰色赘生物，事实上，它是美国冷战时期的雷达站，代号为 "眼镜蛇之雾"。这些购买让戈尔德对其未来有了实质性的发言权。



没有风景的房间 尼古拉斯-戈尔德在他的 "眼镜蛇之雾 "雷达站的空旷大厅里
很久以前，奥福德的男人们会划船穿过狭窄的河流，在尼斯河上猎取野禽。他们从泥泞的小溪中收集牡蛎，从沼泽地中收集海鸥的蛋。在亨利二世时期，这些沼泽地被抽干后，他们在那里放羊和养牛。少数人从事走私活动，甚至海盗活动。

船只经常在海岸附近的险恶水域失事--1627年的一个暴风雨之夜就有32艘船失事。一连串简陋的木制灯塔被烧毁或掉入海中，直到现在的灯塔于1792年建立起来。暴风雨过后，骨头、鞋子、船只的木材和金属制品仍然偶尔会被冲上岸。

1914年第一次世界大战爆发后，公众对当地人所称的 "岛 "的访问就结束了。陆军部想要一个平坦、空旷、远离窥视的地方。奥福德距离最近的小镇伍德布里奇（Woodbridge）有12英里的蜿蜒乡间小路，所以它征用了尼斯岛。

竖起了标牌，警告闯入者将被起诉。大量的材料从奥尔福德的码头运过来，还有廉价的中国劳工，以及后来建造海防、简易机场和机库的德国战俘。在那些早期的岁月里，皇家飞行队，即皇家空军的前身，利用尼斯来测试其第一架飞机，并开发炸弹瞄准器、空中摄影、夜间飞行、降落伞、防火油箱和其他许多东西。

所有的军事工作最终在20世纪70年代停止，除了负责回收数千吨未爆弹药的RAF炸弹处理小组的工作。中央电力局曾短暂地考虑过在这里建造一座核电站，但选择了海岸边的塞兹韦尔。废金属商人和破坏者搬进来，直到国家信托基金在1993年收购尼斯岛。

该基金会没有其他类似的财产。这里没有喝茶的咖啡馆，没有出售果酱和罐装香料的礼品店，也没有什么庇护所。指示牌警告说有未爆炸的炸弹，它可能是一个阴森恐怖、令人不舒服的地方。"这几乎就像在这里发生的所有事情，以及所有在这里工作过的人，在某种程度上仍然存在，"罗霍尔说，他在一个狂风大作的早晨带我参观尼斯。"这当然是一个意见两极分化的地方。人们爱它或恨它。他们对这里所做的事情的伦理和道德有非常强烈的意见。他们对它应该如何管理或离开有强烈的意见"。



景观卫士 国家信托基金的格兰特-罗霍尔专注于保护尼斯的自然历史
我们参观了六个巨大的碉堡。Lohoar解释说，这些碉堡是原子武器研究机构在20世纪50年代和60年代测试英国核武器的复杂、高爆炸性的引爆器的地方，将它们置于极端温度、剧烈冲击和强烈振动之下。他说："从官方角度讲，奥福尼斯岛上从来没有任何裂变材料，""但在这个问题上，你付了钱就可以选择。"

Lohoar打开挂锁的大门，带我进去。这些 "实验室 "仅仅是个外壳。它们的钢梁正在腐蚀，混凝土正在坍塌，配件早就被掠夺一空，只剩下空荡荡的大厅和好奇的坑洞。"他说："任何与它们的功能有关的东西都被抢走了，但它们真正的重要性是作为象征。"它们代表着冷战和疯狂（相互保证的毁灭）。它们代表了我们历史上的一个时期，在这个时期，文明可能会结束自己。"


在尼斯岛的其他地方，我们沿着金属台阶爬上一栋大楼的屋顶，科学家们曾经在这里测量原型炸弹落下时的弹道特性。几十年来，各种形状和大小的弹药都在尼斯岛上进行过测试，在沙石上仍然可以看到弹坑。炸弹和炮弹仍然出现在沼泽地里，或者被冲到海滩上。即使是现在，罗霍尔每隔几个月都要召集炸弹处理专家。

尼斯河上还发生了什么，可能永远不会有人知道。太多的事情被《官方保密法》所覆盖，或者被官方的虚假信息所掩盖。那些在那里工作的人大部分都死了，不愿意说，或者在需要知道的基础上工作。罗霍尔说："有些关键人物的故事我们想录下来，但他们不愿意。"当他还是个年轻的农民时，他曾经盯着尼斯河对面，想知道发生了什么。即使是在那里工作的亲戚也不会告诉他。

一个经常发生的故事是，在第二次世界大战期间，在尼斯的南端有一堵燃烧的石油墙，由水下管道提供燃料，据说这堵墙杀死了一支德国入侵部队或一队英国工兵，并留下他们的尸体散落在海滩上。

然而，一个事实是，在第二次世界大战之前，由罗伯特-沃森-瓦特领导的一个小小的科学家小组在尼斯岛上竞相开发无线电测向，也就是现在的雷达。当沃森-瓦特向他展示第一次奇迹般地追踪到一架远处的飞机时，战争部长宣布："非常有趣，年轻人，但现在该吃午饭了"。结果，在1940年的不列颠之战中，这些科学家的成功给盟军飞行员带来了对德国同行的无价优势。

几十年后，沃森-瓦特在加拿大被雷达枪抓到超速行驶，他写道："可怜的沃森-瓦特爵士/他的雷达阴谋的奇怪目标/因此与其他我可以提及的人一起成为他自己发明的受害者。"



倾斜的风车 在尼斯河上被称为黑灯塔，这个旋转的无线灯塔是1929年7月推出的早期无线电导航系统。
尼斯岛的军事历史很吸引人，但罗霍尔更愿意向我展示其自然历史。从所谓的炸弹弹道大楼的顶部，我们可以看到海口的全景，他指着横跨山石的对角线山脊，就像被一个巨大的犁划过一样。他解释说，每一条都是尼斯河向南延伸时由风暴形成的古老海滩的顶峰--相当于海岸线上的树环。他继续说，沟里没有东西生长，但经过几百年的时间，稀有的地衣和其他植被已经在山脊顶上建立起来，那里的小石头提供了更多的保护。

他承认，尼斯并不像湖区那样明显美丽，但它 "在生态学上绝对特别"。它是欧洲最好的植被沙洲，是欧洲最稀有的栖息地之一，而且特别脆弱。他警告说，如果人们在上面行走，它将永远不会恢复。"这是不可逆转的。它将永远不会回来。"

同样地，罗霍尔赞美了尼斯岛上丰富的鸟类--繁殖的鸟类和涉禽、鳄雀、沼泽鹞、红嘴鸥、杓鹬、金鸻、红嘴鸥、勺子鸟、莺、石雀、红隼、谷仓和短耳鸮。他解释说，在这样一个开放、暴露的环境中，地面筑巢的鸟类很容易受到人类的干扰，如果它们离开巢穴，掠食者会偷走它们的蛋。鼬鼠、黄鼠狼、棕色野兔、田鼠和相当多的偷蛋狐狸也在尼斯岛上繁衍生息。

由于这些原因和其他原因--安全、只能通过渡轮进入、希望保持野性和孤立的感觉--国家信托局将游客限制在每年有限的几天内，每天156人，而不是周日或银行假日。它几乎没有对尼斯进行宣传。没有路标指向它的方向。它每年只有很少的8000名游客，比信托公司的一个伟大的乡村别墅在夏季周末吸引的游客还要少。"我们必须允许游客进入，但不能多到成为一个问题，"Lohoar认为。

广义上讲，信托基金对尼斯的政策是 "有控制的毁坏 "或 "有管理的撤退"--用通俗的话说，就是让自然顺其自然。就这六个碉堡而言，这意味着允许它们崩溃。只有一个被认为是安全的，足以让公众在没有监督的情况下接近，而且修复它们的成本太高。墙壁厚达10英尺，屋顶重达1500吨或更多，拆除它们也不是一个选项。

这种做法既能保护信托基金的财务，又能保护尼斯河上的非人类物种。但这却加剧了罗霍尔和他的克星尼克-戈尔德之间的紧张关系。



海湾的码头 许多旧的军事硬件被允许腐烂。
2011年，Trinity House向信托公司提供了退役的灯塔，该灯塔受到了海岸侵蚀的威胁。尽管这座98英尺高的塔楼是二级保护建筑，是萨福克郡的地标，拥有壮观的景色和丰富多彩的历史，但信托基金拒绝了。信托公司认为，为保护灯塔而建立的海防设施会加速其他地方的侵蚀，而且无论如何都是徒劳的。正如Lohoar所说。"如果我们和北海之间有一场战斗，我们知道谁会赢。"

Gold则持相反观点。多年来，他一直从河对岸的奥尔福德欣赏着这座灯塔。他想尽可能长久地保存它--让当地人享受它。他适时地以2000英镑加上各种债务买下了它，并随之获得了从登陆码头穿过信托财产的路权。"有些人更喜欢新型号的路虎。我更喜欢一座灯塔。他说："这比车内的豪华汽车更有趣。


戈德无视信托基金的规定，在灯塔底座周围的海岸上用沙袋将其保护得更久一些，几乎是历史上第一次向游客开放，甚至在那里举办夏季音乐会。他没有从建筑中赚到钱。相反，他说他要花很多钱来维护它。但他把拯救它描述为他最有价值的三项成就之一--与路透社的浮动汇率并列，当时他为该通讯社的所有者行事，以及恢复皇家戏剧艺术学院的财务，他在该学院的董事会坐了9年。

他喜欢炫耀灯塔，元旦时，190名当地人走过尼斯河，在那里喝了一杯闷酒。"每个人都喜欢灯塔，"他说。"有两三千人参观过它。我们只是无法满足需求。如果我们有足够的志愿者，我们可以轻易地把这个数字提高三倍。"

去年夏天，戈尔德买下了 "眼镜蛇之雾"，这是美国政府在1967年建造的超视距雷达站，用于监测苏联的导弹和火箭发射。按照今天的价格，建造成本超过10亿英镑。大约75万吨的材料被运到尼斯岛。

在其厚厚的钢墙外，一个巨大的扇形蜘蛛网的高耸天线，占地135英亩，面向莫斯科。根据当地的传说，俄罗斯的 "拖网渔船 "满载着天线停泊在萨福克海岸附近。

Lohoar声称，两名带着高倍望远镜的俄罗斯 "鸟类学家 "在奥福德城堡顶部被捕。但 "眼镜蛇之雾 "在六年内就被关闭了。有人说它从未正常工作过；还有人说它被间谍卫星取代了，或者说它是超级大国武器谈判的受害者。此后，英国广播公司世界服务部使用该大楼向东欧广播，直到2011年。

戈尔德不会透露他为该建筑及其所有内容向国防承包商巴布科克国际公司支付了多少钱，但他也承担了他所谓的 "非常重大的责任"--以及与信托公司的另一场激烈争论。

1998年，根据其有管理的撤退政策，信托基金故意忽略了修复保护尼斯河北端的灯笼沼泽的墙。这在生态学上可能是可取的，但在2013年12月的大浪潮中，水冲破了保护眼镜蛇雾的内墙，淹没了周围的土地。



泥泞的水域 眼镜蛇雾的躯体从被淹没的平地中升起
一个春天的早晨，戈尔德带我去了那里。我们需要一辆拖拉机和拖车才能通过洪水。在外面，这个诡异的、没有窗户的冷战遗迹被突出水面的桅杆和泛光灯所包围。在里面，它就像 "奇爱博士 "的废弃场景。

金子带领我穿过眼镜蛇之雾的空旷大厅--除了一个装满了巨大的灰色发射器的大厅外，现在大多是空的。他向我展示了一个老式的玻璃面控制中心，房间中的房间，以防止电子窃听，内部的圣殿有铍涂层的钢门，只有里面有把手。

我们沿着迷宫般的通道来到办公室，墙上挂着褪色的欧洲地图，还有工具车间、食堂、娱乐室和医务室。我们发现了旧的文件柜和包装箱，里面塞满了不知什么东西。我们看到内部楼梯下降到下面浑浊的洪水中。我们不得不用手电筒探索上层，因为它自1973年以来就没有被使用过，而且电力早就被关闭了，这使得它更加阴森。

"当被问及为什么买下它时，戈尔德回答说："这是一个规模宏大的愚蠢行为，但我喜欢古怪的建筑，我真的喜欢。他解释说，眼镜蛇之雾--像灯塔一样--是当地宝贵的资产。他希望利用它来创造当地的就业机会。一家超高速宽带运营商已经在屋顶上竖起了一个桅杆，戈尔德希望移动电话运营商也能很快跟进（奥福德仍然没有移动信号）。有兴趣使用该建筑作为电影场景的制片公司、希望向荷兰广播的广播电台以及需要通信枢纽的巨大的新海上风电场的开发商都与他进行了接触。他认为Cobra Mist将是一个理想的数据中心，周围的土地可以用来建造一个太阳能农场，因为它在作为欧洲最大的雷达站的日子里仍然拥有与国家电网的高容量链接。

戈尔德成为国民信托的成员已有30年。和罗霍尔一样，他说他喜欢尼斯的野性--"一个美丽而诡异的地方"--并且无意 "将它开放给成群结队的人"。但他不接受被轰炸了半个世纪的土地可以如此娇嫩。"它看起来没有太糟糕的状况，这本身就说明了问题"。他不认为尼斯的海防和河防应该任其恶化。他不同意其植物群和动物群应该被优先考虑。他认为，"信托公司的'拒之门外'政策已经走到了极端"，当地人应该更多地接触并受益于这个在20世纪大部分时间里被禁止进入的吐息地。

在过去的三年里，戈尔德和信托公司之间发生了一些激烈的争执：关于防波堤的使用，信托公司员工对灯塔游客的所谓骚扰，以及关于眼镜蛇水雾的淹没。戈德毫不犹豫地使用他的法律能力来维护自己的权利--在国民信托基金的年度大会上提出关键的动议，挖掘出旧的合同来证明信托基金有义务维护河流的防御设施，并威胁说如果信托基金不扭转他的财产被淹没的局面，他将提起诉讼。

现在，一个脆弱的停火协议已经生效。双方最近解决了关于洪水的争端，其条件--就像尼斯河上的许多其他事情一样--仍然是秘密的。Gold和Lohoar都谈到了合作的必要性。但鉴于他们的目标不同，这并不容易。任何关系都可能类似于大海和尼斯本身的关系：一场低水平的消耗战，一个无休止的进退循环，不断地重塑这片奇特的土地。

照片 西蒙-诺福克