Dungeness

Saturday was the day when Jason and I finally managed to get our anniversary arses into gear. We had decided to go to Dungeness. At the time we decided, we didn’t know it was going to be hotter than the face of the sun. Going to the beach is a good thing on a hot day, but it is also an idea nine million other people have, so we set off early to avoid the rush and hopefully get a bit of cool, morning air en route.

We had already had breakfast, but by the time we arrived, we were starving again. Dungeness only has a pub, so we went to the nearby village of Lydd and made like Hobbits. Well we tried to. It turned out to be quite hard, which was surprising in a cafe that was full of people already eating breakfast.

It was a tiny place and there were lots of wait staff but they were not entirely keen on waiting. Eventually someone came and helped us after they had had a ten minute chat with a man who wanted to go into forensic detail about how ‘things are not like they used to be,’ and who then wanted to pay for his breakfast with many small coins. There were other staff, but they were not in the helping line. I would have left at this point, but Jason was very keen on the idea of his second breakfast, so we stayed.

The food was actually really good when it arrived but half way through our meal our original waitress came back to tell us that she had forgotten to tell us that their card machine was broken and they could only take cash, was that a problem? We said that it was actually because we didn’t have any cash on us and it would have been good to know before we started eating. I asked if there was a cash machine nearby. She stared at us blankly. After a few, excruciating minutes, a local came in and told us that there was a bank machine in the Spar round the corner. It was all so painful and if the bubble and squeak hadn’t been so delicious I’d have been a thousand times more aggravated than I was.

Despite my annoyance I always feel better marching on a full stomach and stepping onto the shingle at Dungeness lifted my mood completely. Heat haze rose across the stones, blurring the horizon line into powder puff smudges. The power plant shimmered into view like a mirage, throwing alien shapes against the vast empty backdrop, while the lighthouse rose black and unrepentantly real, a confident exclamation splitting the sky.

Black wood and iron shacks, folding crisp angles against the polished blue of the sky seem startlingly modern. As each shack is bought up by architecturally ambitious people, glass spans the shingle, tying sea and sky to stone and wood. You see slivers of modernism as you wander by. A slice of an Eames chair, a kilim, polished concrete against rippled iron. It’s all texture and line. Old and new marry together in this place of extremes.

There are a few old school shacks left. Peeling paint curls in the blistering sun, lace curtains sag limply at windows, bowing with false modesty, hiding the life inside. You get the sense that the people who live here are at the frontiers, holding the line against the incomers intent on tidying what is wild. Abandoned boats and car parts lay scattered on the shingle, weeds threading through metal and stone, way markers to remind you what happens to new things here.

Dusty green blooms of sea kale sprawl against the ochre patches of stone and the peeling rust of abandoned machinery, while common blue butterflies arc by like torn patches of sky. Abandoned rope curls round empty creels, and clusters of buoys like bladderwrack seaweed washed up at high tide dot the shore. This place is a water starved desert, mocked by the constant hissing of the sea, curling ridges into the mass of shingle. Slow time unfolds here in the wash of tides and the landscape is indifferent to what we do or don’t do. It’s a space that puts you in your place.

Dungeness shone for us today but we agreed that we like it even more in the winter when its bleak and eerie strangeness is shown to its best advantage. As we left, we nodded to Prospect Cottage. It’s only been possible to visit inside the house since 2020 when the house was bought with public donations and I finally have a ticket. I’m so excited.

By the time we left, even the desolate Dungeness was beginning to fill up, mostly with fishermen. We dipped our toes in the drink but the sea there is deep and fierce and not really for playing in, so we decided to move on and go and find the Sound Mirrors at Denge.

I’d never heard of the Sound Mirrors before last year, but then I read about them and two different people told me about them in the space of a fortnight, so it felt like I had to visit. We followed Google Maps, which for some unknown reason took us to the middle of a caravan park and then abandoned us. Eventually it transpired that you have to walk a mile and a half into a nature reserve to find them. At this point the sun was beating down relentlessly and walking even five yards was hard work. We decided to come back on the day we visit Prospect Cottage.

Failing to find the Sound Mirrors had actually been really good fun. We enjoy getting lost as much as we enjoy going to the places we actually set out to find. Some days we never actually get to do the things we thought we would and those are often the best days. We’d already achieved Dungeness perfection so everything after that was a bonus.

We drove to Camber Sands but by the time we got there it was insanely busy and it was just a giant car park full of sweaty people clasping windbreaks. We moved on to Rye, where we wandered about, looking at art we couldn’t afford and eating ice cream. When we got too hot we drove down the coast to Winchelsea, parked at the side of the road and spent a glorious hour on the beach, paddling and mucking about like kids before coming home for a nap, just like kids.