Dungeness: Walking in ‘Britain’s only desert’

This area is very bleak: flat shingle, a few patches of dead gorse in mine craters exploded at the end of the war. A row of pylons that stretch to the horizon crackle with electricity: under them, to the east of the power station, a road constructed of railway sleepers is slowly rotting.”

In Modern Nature, Derek Jarman’s diary where he documented his time living in Dungeness in Kent between 1989 and 1990, the multi-disciplinary artist often wrote about his surroundings. Following his HIV diagnosis in 1986, Jarman was encouraged to move to the desolate landscape, in which he famously tended to an intricate garden before sadly passing away in 1994.

I was born in 1991, and while I wouldn’t discover Jarman until much later, it wasn’t too long after that I became aware of Dungeness. Some of my earliest memories as a kid involved playing on Sandgate beach, looking out to the nuclear power station on the opposite side of the coast, which my granddad had helped to build from 1965. I remember seeing its strange, rectangular shape on the horizon, appearing to float alone in the middle of the English Channel.

Get up close to it today and Dungeness is no less strange. It’s bleak, as Jarman noted, but also beautiful and otherworldly. The sky is intimidatingly big here and the land is flat – its stretch of shingle is one of the largest in Europe. It’s often described as Britain’s only desert – a brag rejected by the Met Office – but it's not hard to see why.

As I walk across the unique landscape on a windy November morning, its vast expanse of land swallows me up, making me feel insignificant in a way not dissimilar to a desert. “My garden’s boundaries are the horizon”, Jarman wrote in his diary, and he wasn’t wrong.

On the face of it, there isn’t much to see on a stroll through Dungeness. The land is relatively empty, the horizon broken only by a smattering of houses, two lighthouses and the nuclear power station, which dominates the skyline, its methodical, continuous hum only adding to the eeriness. But this is part of the attraction of Dungeness, especially in 2020.

Its emptiness and lack of people makes it seem as though it’s designed for social distancing. Space is a valued commodity here; the roughly 80 houses and shacks dotted throughout are spaced evenly apart, allowing each other to breathe. And on a quiet day you can walk for hours and count the number of people you see on one hand.  

Of the people you do see, not many of them are likely to be long term locals. Whereas 50 years ago the majority of the shacks were made up of fishing families, today a number of wealthy outsiders make up the numbers, and this is reflected in the architecture.

As I drive slowly down Dungeness Road, the single strip of tarmac that dissects the headland, I see a black-panelled, angular, barn-like structure with big glass windows that looks straight out of a Scandinavian crime drama. Then, a more traditional weatherboard cottage with the Romney Light Railway miniature train track running through its back garden. It’s no time before I see Jarman’s own Prospect Cottage, its famous garden pristinely maintained – albeit lacking its summer colour – thanks to new custodians Creative Folkestone who helped to save it through a £3.6m crowdfunding campaign earlier this year.

Delving deeper into the bowels of Dungeness, I come across a coastguard cottage converted by late Magnum photographer Peter Marlow and his partner Fiona Naylor, as well as their other, former industrial properties: Experimental Station, Fog Signal and Pump Station. These rest opposite a number of more modest homes, including a former train carriage said to be built in 1885 for Queen Victoria, as well as a smattering of single storey shacks. I begin my walk here, outside the Britannia Inn pub, which is sandwiched between the two lighthouses.

Throughout the Dungeness estate, you’ll see information boards hinting at the abundant wildlife that inhabits it. Bittern, little ringed plover, smew and other birds I’ve never heard of call Dungeness home at points in the year. There are rare moths here too, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not.

In the warmer months, plants that sound like witches’ potions light up the shingle, seemingly immune to the harsh winds and feral landscape. Viper’s bugloss and yellow horned poppy compete for the sun’s attention. All in all, Dungeness is home to 600 different plants, which is a third of all species in the UK. I see none of this on my visit, perhaps through ignorance or perhaps because my eyes are streaming. No bother – I’m more interested in the abandoned boats.

There are a number of deserted objects littered across the shingle. I walk towards the beach to get a closer look. I admire a derelict, rusting tractor that was surely a trusty steed in its past life. I appreciate the mechanical winches that were once used to haul fishing boats back from the sea. And then there are the boats themselves; some are very much operational, used by locals for the daily catch, but others have been left to rot, now contributing to the landscape only visually, as sculptures of a sort.

There’s an empty hut covered in worn out paint and graffiti, an original 1920s tanning copper used for fishing nets that looks like a hardcore pizza oven, a dilapidated rail track once used for hauling the day’s catch, and a large ‘T’ structure, originally built to help boats get ashore. It looks like it belongs at Burning Man. These are the objects that make Dungeness special. This is a place that hasn’t changed for decades. It’s been left in its raw state and has refused to be refurbished or developed to make it cleaner, prettier, or more habitable.

Walk further along the coast and you might see the Denge sound mirrors, a series of monolith concrete structures built in the late 1920s to detect the sound of enemy planes crossing the Channel. Jarman warns against the rest of the neighbouring town though: “Shut your eyes and think of the ugliest seaside development you have ever seen, open them and behold! Greatstone.” Perhaps not then. I feel content after a short stroll in Dungeness anyway. A walk here is refreshing, the open space calming and the lack of change reassuring. It may be strange but it’s all the better for it.

Kent is currently in tier 4, which means residents should stay in their local area and those from other tiers should not be visiting without a good reason.