Here is a small travel gallery from Dungeness on the south-east tip of England. It’s a place I find unusually inspiring as a writer – both because of its slightly spooky and strange atmosphere and because it is comforting that such an eccentric place can still exist in this country! Dungeness is the largest shingle bank in Europe – a vast area of gravely stones colonised by tough plants. It is like a desert, but it has a very distinct human presence, for two reasons. Firstly, it is scattered with isolated houses like nothing you see anywhere else in Kent. Perhaps it is where eccentrics go to live somewhere away from all the usual town normalcy. Perhaps i will live there myself one day. It is a place where the normal laws of civilization seem just slightly occluded – by distance and spirit.
Also, wherever you are in this flat landscape, you are constantly in the shadow of the huge Dungeness nuclear power station.
You get there by riding – of all things – a long miniature railway line, complete with small working steam engines. The famous Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. That railway provides the last surreal touch as it strikes out from the familiar south Kent marshes and enters the great shingle sea. What else WOULD you expect to see crossing this lonely wasteland, bristling with pylons?
In spite of the railway, the shingle itself is filled with the feeling of ruin and decay. The houses look rickety. The church (if that is what it is) is the eeriest i have ever seen and in ways i cant quite put my finger on. Old forgotten structures sit crumbling in the wilderness. Mysterious posts sticking up out of the gravel with no current purpose . . . Even the plants are strange. Small and stunted – and sometimes suffering strange deformations.
It looks like a glimpse of the future.
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