Time To Stop and Stare

Dungeness Headland – a vast bank of flint shingle covering over 20 square kilometres, reaching 3 kilometres out into the English Channel towards France. It is one of the largest examples of its kind in the world! Apparently it is at least 5,000 years old, created from flints released during the erosion of the chalk cliffs that once extended from Kent to France before the UK became an island. These great chalk beds are now largely gone, taken by the sea in just the last 12,000 years as sea-levels have risen (a reminder that climate change is nothing new). At Dungeness this process has left behind trillions of pieces of shingle that now form a unique habitat for numerous species of insects, bees, butterflies, invertebrates and many species of wild plants and flowers too. Surprisingly, for what can appear at first glance to be a shingle desert – perhaps even an industrial wasteland – it is one of the most environmentally diverse places in the UK.

Dungeness - officially the UK’s only ‘desert’

There are signs of human activity everywhere. Broken, overgrown sheds and buildings; rusting machinery; twisted fence posts; a scattering of once-colourful boats, some now faded past their best; broken signs oddly warning against trespass; the remains of paths to nowhere; modern wooden trackways placed to keep the tourists off the shingle; a line of wooden telephone poles; assorted timber homes painted black to protect them against the salty sea air; tall slender concrete lighthouses warning of the danger to shipping that is ever-present; and looming large over everything – the dysfunctional Dungeness nuclear power station. (If anything is an argument against nuclear power it is this. Shut and unusable, apparently due to major design flaws and too expensive to actually decommission and remove – is this the true legacy of nuclear energy!)

Dungeness nuclear power station - dwarfs the adjacent houses

I guess that the people who choose to make Dungeness their home, also choose to ignore the power station that ironically blocks out the setting sun during some months of the year. Maybe, they think of it as just one more piece of broken engineering – regarding it as a visual ‘artwork’ in the landscape, as some sort of act of defiance. It is a legacy of a time when the cost of ‘unmaking’ our creations was not factored into product design. Sadly, the power station will not slowly rust into oblivion like the other pieces of industrial detritus that now dot the shingle. Instead, it must be maintained for decades to come to avoid an ecological disaster.

Many of the cottages once contained those seeking solitude and perhaps a deeper connection with the natural world. Such people tend not to crave modernity, except in the basic sense of a secure shelter and warmth. They tend not to be fashionistas – unless their own curious tastes are adopted by the world outside. Their ‘gardens’ are mostly no more than extensions of the shingle world in which they have chosen to live, perhaps occasionally modified by some additional planting, but more often containing flotsam found washed up by the tide or fragments taken from the decaying industrial remains. These elements are then often re-configured, perhaps to provoke questions within those of us who stop to look.

Derek Jarman is one of the more famous names who once chose to make this place his home during the final years of his life. Called ‘Prospect Cottage’, it is now a ‘memorial’ that can be visited by arrangement. As with most of the cottage gardens, his garden has no hard boundaries, so it is possible to wander in to it and to see the house, once a fisherman’s bothy, set in the shingle. There are many sculptures, as well as some new planted areas. The house itself is of course black, but with yellow windows and doors that catch the eye. There is part of a poem by John Donne called ‘The Rising Sun’, filling one gable, in effect turning the house itself into one more garden sculpture.

Wild flowers and plants are everywhere at Dungeness, providing colour and structure that varies throughout the year. When I visit castles, great houses and gardens, I am always looking for the creative hand of people – for examples of ‘betterment’. I’m eager to explore – to take in the orchards, the walled gardens, the flowerbeds where new cultivars are being developed and new fruit and vegetables grown. I enjoy seeing the progress we have made over the centuries – not just our inventive genius as a species, but our creative genius too for making places in which to ‘stop and stare’ - to appreciate life itself. How curious that Dungeness, at first glance the antithesis of such places, offers this ‘sense of place’, almost accidentally. In a way, being there, exposes the essence of who and what we are as a species. Maybe we don’t need all of the ‘stuff’ that fills our lives.

It is not just artists who are affected by the allure of Dungeness. It now has many visitors from around the world, some of whom I believe, go there to experience the refreshing solitude. Timber walkways have been provided to connect the road to the shore to try to limit the damage that too many feet can do to such a fragile habitat. And some of the small black cottages can now be rented out as holiday homes. It has become a victim of its own unlooked-for success. Maybe this also reflects a deeper need in us all. Dungeness has natural ‘hygge’ – something that the Scots call ‘coorie’. It is important this is not lost in the drive towards monetization.

The above Text and all Photographs are copyright of Wincenty (Wicek) Sosna. Please contact SeeHow for permission to reproduce in any way, in part or as the complete text.