Return to Dungeness

I’d said I wanted to return and today we do; we’re back in Dungeness. I refrain from revisiting Prospect Cottage, afraid that I won’t be able to recapture the wonder and magic of earlier in the week. Besides, today’s visit is to explore that other-worldly post-apocalyptic landscape of the shingle shores, and the morning’s clouds provide the ideal back cloth. I realise, as with most of this weeks roamings, we’re in a world familiar to many blippers, but to us it’s new and fascinating. 

We explore a world of found objects, oil tanks, winches, chains - all left to rust and rot; of repurposing - railway carriages reused as fishing huts until they rotted into dust, now replaced by metal vans and old containers, their ghost signs peering through new graffiti or old rust and verdigris. 

Boats of various shapes and sizes lay becalmed on steep shingle banks, hauled from the sea by ancient rusted winches. Many are working boats, well kept and lying close to the rough detritus of the fishing trade; others are well past their working lives, wooden panels splintered, paint sparse and blistered, metal rusted. One old vessel lies charred and broken by the rusted, twisted tracks of the once-active railway  used to haul catches over the unyielding shingle. 

We have the compulsory fish and chips at The Pilot - and very good they are, before a walk around the RSPB reserve. Birds seems few and far between but we are thrilled to spot a Marsh Harrier - or possibly a pair. 

By now, I’m so tired it’s hard to put one foot in front of another, but there’s still one more quest: G wants to see the Sound Mirrors, once Britain’s early warning system of incoming flights until their days of usefulness were ended by the invention of radar. I struggle with yet more shingle paths, but seeing these relics looming up across the flooded gravel pit is worth it - and an appropriately eerie sight on this day of other-worldly exploration. (More in the link below, if you are interested) 

I feel today’s main must be mono, but I’m fascinated both by the surprising range of colour in the wooden wrecks and by the beauty of the charred and rusting structures all around - hence two collages. And there’s an extra of the Denge Sound Mirrors too. 

Thank you for your very generous response to yesterday’s castle blip, and apologies for my current absence from your journals - normal service will soon be restored!  You’ll be pleased to know that the recalcitrant Sigma has now been ‘persuaded’ to unjam - but that wide angle iPhone lens is still wonderfully invaluable! 

http://www.andrewgrantham.co.uk/soundmirrors/locations/denge/