Once you reach the edge of Romney Marsh, with lid at your back, and in front of you, you
interview the vast open sky, and the flatlands and the shacks leading to the promontory and
out into the sea. You can't help but wonder at what point, when you took that right turn,
past the shrunken houses and the narrow gauge railway, did you end up in this other place?
Dungeon S sits between two worlds. I suppose you could say it's neither here nor there.
It seems to have stopped some time around 1962, but then there is something else, something
carried on the wind, trapped within the light, a pervading sense that this is the future,
albeit one that we have yet to arrive at.
A first-time visitor to Dungeon S may not immediately appreciate this seemingly bleak
and desolate, windswept wilderness, with its sparse vegetation, skeletal hulks of a diminished
local fishing industry, tar-blackened outhouses, and rows of rusty shipping containers, all
dusted down with a layer of crystals formed by the penetrating salt-filled air.
Yet Dungeon S is far from this vision of a barren, impotent wasteland. It is in effect
a very large and constantly shifting shingle promontory, and one of Europe's best examples
of a cuspid forland, a result of longshore drift occurring in two directions, merging
two spits of land into a triangular protrusion into the sea. Although the name is more likely
to be an amalgam from the old Norse for Headland, Ness, and the nearby Denge Marsh, it is due
to this protrusion that popular etymology ascribes a French origin for the toponym, a
variation on dangerous nose. Although as to why the nose was seen as dangerous, no one
seems to have an answer.
These days the danger is more apparent. In 1965 the Central Electricity Generating Board
connected the Magnox reactor, Dungeon S-A, to the National Grid. It ceased operation
in 2006 and is currently being decommissioned. The AGR power station, Dungeon S-B, with its
two reactors, began operation in 1983. It is due to cease generating electricity in 2018.
The shingle has been moving constantly northeast since its origins at pet level near Hastings.
The sea sifts the shingle, retaining the smaller stones at the littoral and spewing the large
ones further inshore, creating a natural breakwater and slowly moving the Ness on its way along
the coast.
Are we through?
I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know what I'm talking about, I don't know what I'm talking about.
However the area is volatile and at high risk of flooding. In order to protect the power stations it has been necessary to maintain the sea defenses to prevent the natural coastal erosion.
The sea moves the shingle away at such a rate, a staggering 6 meters per annum, that a sycyphean bucket brigade of dumpertrucks relays back and forth across the shingle, showing up what will soon be gone again.
Nature's revenge you might think, for those carbuncle barnacles determinedly fixed onto the back of the Leviathan.
Yet paradoxically, this symbiosis has startling ecological benefits and it all boils down, quite literally, to the place the local fisherman called the patch.
The waste hot water and sewage from the nuclear power stations are pumped into the sea through two outfall pipes, enriching the biological productivity of the seabed and attracting seabirds from miles around.
Far from Barron, Dungeoness is teeming with life. Pioneer species colonize the shore. Hardy perennials rise to the challenge of living life between the salt marsh and the deep blue sea.
Ecological succession establishes order, resulting in a climatic climax. In this case, vegetative shingle, harboring an abundance of plant and invertebrate communities, mammals and bird life.
A third of all types of plant species found in Britain are found here. Many of the rarest insects and spiders can be seen here, some of them found nowhere else in Britain.
It is a designated National Nature Reserve, a special protection area, a special area of conservation and a site of special scientific interest.
As well as the plant and animal life, the power stations and the lighthouses, the fishermen, the birds and the boil. A small community has settled here. There are tar-blackened bungalows and cottages, huts, shacks and lean-toes, even architect-designed eco-houses, made from old railway cars and caravans, old fishing boats and driftwood.
The artist Derek Jarman lived here. He is buried nearby in St Clement's Church, Old Romney. In his book, Chroma, he writes,
Not everyone finds solace in green. There's too much green in England. Dungeoness, with its ochre grasses and bone-bleach shingle, came as a relief.
The conventional temptations of old and new Romney, of great stone and little stone, dim church, hide and lid, are not for those souls who seek solace amongst the sea kale and shingle of Dungeoness.
They are the flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore, either by sea or by choice, each of them believing that they have found a special place, and how I envy them.
For it is a special place, this Dungeoness, an otherworldly shingle desert, complete with a shimmering nuclear mirage, and dotted with oases of hermit crab-like abodes. The air fizzes in your ears as the wind chafes your cheeks and the salt frosts your lips,
and you can almost count each individual particle of light, as they hang suspended all around you in the space that is neither here nor there.
You can almost count each individual particle of light, as they hang suspended all around you in the space that is neither here nor there.
You can almost count each individual particle of light, as they hang suspended all around you in the space that is neither here nor there.
On the 15th of February 2011, a public inquiry began into the expansion of Lid Airport. The owners wished to see its capacity grow to cater for two million passengers per annum.
The airport lies two miles away from Dungeoness. Any expansion on this scale could prove catastrophic for the area.
Please join the fight against expansion. For details of where to find out more about the inquiry and the arguments against the expansion,
please go to Facebook, LID Airport Action Group, or this website, www.kentnet.org.uk, LAAG, index.htm.
Thank you for watching.
