On the southern edge of the Wash, where the great tidal notch cuts between East Anglia and the Lincolnshire coast, lies a stretch of marsh that spends its days under bombardment. RAF Holbeach is a live-fire range, used daily by British, American and allied aircraft for target practice, and the flatlands here are scattered with the evidence: beached hulks standing in for ships at sea, and huge target boards more usually seen on an archery range, only built to a scale that suits jet fighters rather than arrows. By day it’s a place of noise and impact. By night, it falls eerily silent, and a different kind of beauty takes over.

I found it by accident, scrolling across satellite imagery one evening, hunting for a foreground subject far enough from the nearest streetlight to be worth the drive. What caught my eye was the control tower, standing alone at the marsh’s edge, watching over the emptiness it presides over each day. What sealed it was a public footpath running right past it, close enough to make a foreground without straying onto MOD property!.

I checked for any planned night exercises before I went (light painting courtesy of the RAF wasn’t quite the plan), then drove up through the Fens on a warm July evening, arriving as the last gold of the day gave way to deepening blue. The tower’s lights were off, and a short walk brought me right up beside it. Even so, I spent the whole session slightly on edge, half expecting a patrol to appear and ask what exactly I thought I was doing out there in the dark with a tripod. I was fairly confident I wasn’t breaking any rules, but there’s something about the idea of armed men with dogs that makes you doubt your own reasoning. Nobody came.

Cloud had other ideas for the night. The star trail I’d planned dissolved into a timelapse of drifting cloud over the tower, more moody than the shot I’d hoped for. But in the gaps, the sky gave me two chances: one looking south, the Milky Way arching over the tower with a faint reflection caught in a marsh creek, and one to the north north east, Perseus and Cassiopeia rising quietly over the flatlands. It was enough to make the trip worthwhile, and enough to make me want to come back. Orion and Barnard’s Loop over that same silhouette, next winter, feels like unfinished business.