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Where England sinks into the sea The strange and shifting history of Dungeness resonates with our modern dilemmas

Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway passing the lighthouse at Dungeness. Credit: SSPL/Getty Images

Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway passing the lighthouse at Dungeness. Credit: SSPL/Getty Images


August 4, 2020   7 mins

Looking south from my childhood bedroom, the horizon was never dark, even on the gloomiest of nights in the depths of winter. Even during power cuts, which seemed to occur much more often than they do now, the row of bright lights remained undimmed. They belonged to the two nuclear power stations that stand on the coast at Dungeness.

Dungeness is an odd sort of place, to put it mildly. To get a sense of what it is like, think of an artists’ community in a near-desert of shingle, consisting of houses built from driftwood and old train carriages, all on a storm-battered headland in Kent, with a globally unique ecosystem, a tiny steam railway, and of course those two gigantic nuclear plants dominating the view to the south.

Its remoteness and unique atmosphere has proved irresistible to artists, most famously the film director Derek Jarman, who moved to a cottage there after falling ill with AIDS in the 1980s. One of my favourite painters, Eric Ravilious, executed a striking picture of the old lighthouse in 1939. The year after that, Dungeness Point was the scene of a darkly comic vignette of wartime history: two Nazi spies who were landed there blew their cover by attempting to buy alcohol before noon at a pub in nearby Lydd, and were later hanged.

Eric Ravilious’s painting of Dungeness lighthouse

Had there not been a war on, it is easy to imagine that the landlady who reported Herr Meier and Herr Waldberg might not have been such a stickler. Romney Marsh, of which Dungeness forms the southern boundary, had for many years the reputation of a place where the law’s writ ran a little unevenly.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries smuggling was rife. It is one of the closest points to the continent on the whole English coast, conveniently furnished with numerous gently sloping beaches, and in past centuries was inaccessible and hard to navigate for the stranger. Rudyard Kipling, who lived not far away, at Burwash on the Sussex Weald, contributed to the image of the Kentish smugglers as charming rogues with his famous poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’:

“Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie —
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!”

Another builder of the romantic legends was the author Russell Thorndike. He wrote the Dr Syn series, splendidly preposterous old-fashioned swashbucklers about a mild-mannered Church of England cleric, the Vicar of Dymchurch, who moonlights as The Scarecrow, feared chief of a gang of smugglers. They lead the Revenue a merry dance over the course of seven novels. I was introduced to the books by my father, who is himself a mild-mannered Church of England cleric living on Romney Marsh, but not as far as I am aware a notorious brandy smuggler.

People who have heard of the Marsh are often familiar with its two most famous institutions. Firstly, the Romney breed of sheep, which is now farmed all over the world, from South America to New Zealand, where it makes up more than half of that country’s 40 million-strong flock.

A nineteen century print of a pair of Romney Marsh sheep. Credit: Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

And secondly, the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, the 1920s brainchild of millionaire enthusiasts Captain Howey and Count Louis Zborowski, and now a popular attraction for tourists from all over the world. Its fame has spread considerably — there is a Shuzenji Romney Railway in Japan, closely modelled on its English namesake. During the Second World War, a special armoured train ran on the railway’s line, acting as a sort of mobile anti-aircraft unit; it scored only one success, but certainly looked good in propaganda newsreels. Indeed, the entire line was taken over for military purposes, which was hardly surprising given that the enemy lay less than 30 miles away.

A steam train on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway with the nuclear power plant in the background. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

The proximity of Europe has been pivotal in the Marsh’s history. Those original continental troublemakers the Romans had a port at Lympne, a village which now lies some distance from the shore following the retreat of the coastline. You will still occasionally hear the chauvinistic local legend that William the Conqueror initially attempted to land near New Romney, but was seen off by the hardy locals, and only then tried his luck further west at Pevensey, where he made his successful landing against the (by implication) soft and irresolute Sussex men. The tale has a kernel of truth: it seems that some of the Bastard’s men did disembark at New Romney by mistake and were rebuffed, but it was a small scale engagement.

Long after the ructions caused by the Normans, the French continued to be a source of unquiet, as well as informal duty-free booze, on the Marsh. From 1800, the coast was heavily fortified against a feared Napoleonic invasion, with the building of the Royal Military Canal at the foot of the surrounding hills to delay any invading French army, and a chain of small gun-emplacements called Martello towers, alongside larger forts at Dungeness and Hythe. Later, the district was expected to be one of the sites for a Nazi invasion; inspection of captured plans after the war confirmed that this had indeed been the enemy’s intention. The field next to my parents’ house contains a concrete bunker dating from this time, presumably intended to defend the road into town from the beach.

Romney Marsh is not nowadays marshland as most people would imagine it. There is no great Grimpen Mire waiting to entrap the incautious traveller, and no squelching bog. For some centuries, most of the Marsh has been grazing pasture. This has not always been the case: well into the second millennium AD, what is now the Marsh was a mix of shallow tidal lagoon and true marshland, with the River Rother snaking through the southern parts.

The lay of the land was radically altered by a series of fierce Channel storms in the second half of the thirteenth century, culminating in the notorious Great Storm of 1287. Old Winchelsea, a substantial place with an estimated population in the thousands, was entirely obliterated and most of the island on which it stood submerged, Atlantis-like, by the surging sea. The modern town of Winchelsea, founded by the survivors of this event, stands on top of a hill: they weren’t taking any chances (although their eventful history wasn’t over — Winchelsea suffered French and Spanish raids during the Hundred Years War and was burned by the French in 1360).

A 13th century map of Romney Marsh.

The aftermath of the Great Storm was tough for the place in which I grew up, New Romney. Not only was it severely damaged but, having been a thriving port at the mouth of the Rother, the town’s economic fortunes also declined rapidly after 1287, as the course of the river had shifted well to the south, rendering the harbour useless. Whether the storm itself was directly to blame, as local folk history suggests, or whether the lower Rother and the harbour had become gradually choked with silt and shingle over many decades, and the storm was simply the last straw, the town became something of a backwater.

The fluctuating shape and extent of the Marsh, and changing patterns of land use, have resulted in numerous once thriving communities being abandoned. Within a day’s walk of my parents’ house, there are at least four ruined churches situated far from any modern settlements. One such example is the dramatic All Saints, which served the long-extinct parish of Hope.

Hope Church of All Saints at Romney Marsh. Credit: Ziggy Stardust via Flickr

Not all these lost communities vanished as suddenly and dramatically as Old Winchelsea. Broomhill, close to Dungeness, gradually became uninhabitable due to the encroachment of the sea in late medieval times. Many villages and hamlets were badly affected by the Black Death or by the malaria which seems to have lingered well into the eighteenth century.

Other relics reflect the more recent past. Close to the trackbed of the partially dismantled Appledore-New Romney branch line, a casualty of the Beeching Terror — the rails remain in place as far as Dungeness, for the sole purpose of transporting spent nuclear fuel — stand three very strange concrete structures. One is a large convex vertical wall, measuring about 200 feet from end to end. The other two resemble giant satellite dishes, set in sturdy stone bases. One is about 30 feet in diameter, the other about 20 feet. They are acoustic mirrors, the legacy of interwar experiments with creating an early-warning system for enemy aircraft crossing the Channel. Similar installations survive at Hythe, and on the cliffs near Dover, but they were never used in anger, having been superseded by radar by the mid-1930s.

The acoustic mirrors at Dungeness. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

The mirrors contribute to the somewhat eerie beauty of the Marsh, with its long unimpeded views and big skies. Perhaps too the precariousness of the Marsh’s existence adds a certain drama and savour to the contemplation of its landscape. After all, most of the land between the Royal Military Canal and the Channel is at or below sea-level: everyone who lives on the Marsh depends on the coastal defences. In the Dr Syn books, Russell Thorndike quotes a fictional though highly apt motto for the Marshfolk: “Serve God, honour the King, but first maintain the Wall.”

It’s hard not to draw lessons for what we might think of as our uniquely modern dilemmas: the inescapability of some kind of entanglement with our European neighbours, however secure we may feel in our island redoubt; the imperative for humility and flexibility in our dealings with the inexorable forces of nature; and the need to accept inevitable change to maintain the broad shape of a way of life.


Niall Gooch is a public sector worker and occasional writer who lives in Kent.

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nick harman
nick harman
4 years ago

Sounds rather awful. I wonder who paid for it?

R S Foster
R S Foster
4 years ago

…not only have we got two of the great offices of state occupied by the Children of immigrants, but the condition of slavery became unlawful in England with the Somersett Case in 1772…we took it upon ourselves to abolish the Slave Trade in 1807, and set the Royal Navy to putting it down whether people agreed with us or not over the next fifty or sixty years (at a great cost of blood and treasure)…the final destination of the US “underground railroad” for escaped slaves was Canada, under the Union Flag…our own franchise advanced on the basis of property throughout the nineteenth century, but was always colour-blind…our first non-white MPs were elected in the 1890’s…and one of the contributory factors to the US Civil Rights movement was the experience of Black GI’s in Great Britain, where they were warmly welcomed and the only “colour bar” they normally experienced was one sometimes insisted on by their own Army to avoid trouble between black and white US soldiers.

This is our history on this…why on earth is somebody therefore disseminating a US version which is wholly different? And indeed why is A-Level teaching on the issue based on US as opposed to UK experience?

Giulia Khawaja
Giulia Khawaja
4 years ago
Reply to  R S Foster

Excellent comment which really demonstrates the injustices being meted out to the white population of these islands. The danger is that eventually some white people will get angry with constantly being denigrated when this country has done a great deal to ensure fair treatment for all people regardless of race or religion.
The white people who ignore this are even more to blame.

Ralph Windsor
Ralph Windsor
4 years ago
Reply to  Giulia Khawaja

The danger is not so much that “some white people will get angry” as that more people of all ethnicities are not aware of what is happening, why it is happening and exactly how it is happening. Then they should all be angry with the perpetrators.

Ralph Windsor
Ralph Windsor
4 years ago
Reply to  R S Foster

Why? Because the leadership of all political parties and a large part of the whole political class is too spineless to confront the issue.

Jordan Flower
Jordan Flower
4 years ago
Reply to  R S Foster

America was only slightly behind England in several ways, but simultaneous in others, including our own abolishment of the slave trade in the same year, signed by Jefferson, who despite being a slave owner himself, spoke often of its moral vacuity, and helped blaze a path for its abolishment. We too then sent our Navy out to patrol the Atlantic to put a stop to it.

Slavery in America was largely due to the fact that British colonizing created a demand for slave labor in ways that Britain did not have to deal with, on an already long-developed island.

In the same way, France who is often lauded by the historically illiterate for “abolishing slavery SO EARLY in 1315”, only did so on their metropolitan mainland, yet continued to trade and use slaves on their many ships, as this wasn’t technically “land”. Once The Atlantic slave trade and exploration west began to pop off, France then “transacted” over 3x as many slaves as they colonized the West Indies and other places.

Of the 12 million or so slaves brought west, only roughly 5% ended up in America by the hands of Britain/USA.

When was the last time you saw a massive demonstration to decry the sordid past of France to the same degree we see for the US and Britain?

My point isn’t to have a contest between nations to see who the worst offender was. It’s more to just point out how unfortunately socially and politically acceptable slavery was, not only in that era, but for the entirety of recorded human history. It was the rule. Not the exception.

What makes absolutely no sense is how the very nations/societies that risked their own lives, and economies to end a virtually eternal cycle of slavery, are demonized by imbeciles who think an apparatus as massive as slavery could be just switched off like a light switch.

These same imbeciles will shudder in 50 years when their battery-powered-zero-emissions-flying-car-driving grandchildren cancel them because they owned a 2005 Honda Civic, which had a gasoline engine”which as we all know will be responsible for the deaths of how many billion people in 10 years?

Stephen Follows
Stephen Follows
4 years ago
Reply to  R S Foster

Because Conservative black people are not real black people (says the Left).

Trevor Q
Trevor Q
4 years ago

Thank you I enjoyed reading that.

chrisjwmartin
chrisjwmartin
4 years ago

There is a bitter irony for Rowling that she was a full-throated identity canceller herself, in her case of anyone who had the temerity to disagree with her feminist identity politics. Now that identity politics has logically progressed onto its latest stage of insanity, she wishes to draw an arbitrary line separating her identity politics from the identity politics that is persecuting her. But the only line here is the arrow pointing from Rowling’s identity politics to the terrorist atrocities of BLM-Antifa and the Orwellian unpersoning perpetrated by the powerful trans lobby. She sowed the wind, and she has reaped the whirlwind.

David Stanley
David Stanley
4 years ago

As a child I spent every summer in Dymchurch. They were such magical times which came to an end during my surly, teenage years.

The whole area is a great place for kids. If you’re 5 years old the funfair and arcade at Dymchurch are like Las Vegas. The steam train is good fun and the local area has some unique environments and history.

I went back a couple of years ago for the first time since childhood and I’m pleased to say that it still seems to be doing very well. I fully intend to take my foster child there at some point. At the risk of sounding like a Trip Advisor review, I highly recommend a visit there for any young families. There’s no need to go abroad when we’ve got such great places to stay in the UK.

Willie Gunn
Willie Gunn
4 years ago
Reply to  David Stanley

Me too……the article and your post took me back to my childhood in the 1950s. Thank you.

Peter KE
Peter KE
4 years ago

Interesting article, good work. Maybe more can be done to expose the origins of the advertising. Is it russian or chinese using the thugs and idiots of these riots.

Maybe the advertising standards needs to do something useful and tackle this problem?

Mark Corby
Mark Corby
4 years ago

Splendid essay, thank you.

A real evocation of Enid Blyton’s England, particularly that wonderful little railway, which has hardly changed since opening in 1927.

Grandchildren and others are enthralled as you thunder along at 30mph, which scaled up would be 90mph! The driver pushing the turntable round was also a high point of any journey. All in all sheer nectar for young and old alike!

One sad mention was the now redundant Nuclear Power Station. A stark reminder of what a fiasco our nuclear industry has become, despite leading the world with Calder Hall in 1957.

,

Andrew D
Andrew D
4 years ago

Thanks for an enjoyable piece. Was it Betjeman who christened the railway the Rather Dim and High Church Railway?

Bill Brookman
Bill Brookman
4 years ago

Prospect magazine is the poorer to lose you; UnHerd, the richer. Keep it up Sam.

chrisjwmartin
chrisjwmartin
4 years ago
Reply to  Bill Brookman

FYI, UnHerd irritatingly has two pages for every topic, and this is the wrong one. I think it’s down to clicking on the links from the emails rather than from the website.

Peter KE
Peter KE
4 years ago

Interesting article. Thank goodness the french are willing to take on the terrorists.

John Ellis
John Ellis
4 years ago

A very nice piece, thank you. Brought back some good memories of my visit, years ago, as well.

mikeedwardz.edwards
mikeedwardz.edwards
4 years ago

What an interesting meditation on such a lovely area too easily written off as just “flat”. Of course the flatness does make it very easy and relaxed cycling country with a surprisingly wide range of wildlife to be spotted from the saddle.

Fraser Bailey
Fraser Bailey
4 years ago

‘Even during power cuts, which seemed to occur much more often than they do now,’

Well that’s because Mrs Thatcher sorted out the unions. That aside, it is articles like this that make me aware of just how little of England I really know.

Lindsay Gatward
Lindsay Gatward
4 years ago

Fascinating. Love the old map. What a different world they had then.

Chris Milburn
Chris Milburn
4 years ago

Beautifully written and very interesting – thanks to the author

daniel Earley
daniel Earley
4 years ago

I grew up in Lydd and Dungeness was my playground.

Shon Ellerton
Shon Ellerton
4 years ago

I used to live in Ashford and went many times to Dungeness. I had a tour of the nuclear power plant as well. I believe it was the newer one I went to visit. I remember the great fish and chips at The Pilot. Possibly the best I’ve had. It is an eery place. I noticed lots of bits of paper stuck to fences and I don’t know why that is. Anyone know?

Hosias Kermode
Hosias Kermode
4 years ago

Romney Marsh is apparently one of the best places in England from which to view the heavens. Least ambient light. I would drive to Dungeness to view the Perseids once upon a time. After a dinner of Romney Marsh lamb at the George in Rye (now depressingly destroyed by fire) That whole coast is magical.

R S Foster
R S Foster
4 years ago

…comments seem to have disappeared, so I say again the UK are sending a “long range reconaissance force” to support the French in the Sahel…250 strong, which I assume is a Squadron from the Light Dragoon Guards and a Company from the Royal Anglians, plus support…

mark taha
mark taha
4 years ago

The French have always been realistic about Africa.

Giulia Khawaja
Giulia Khawaja
4 years ago

It would be interesting to know who is behind the video of BLM . I looked at the BLM website and it does appear to have strong connections to very far Left organisations. And the unsettling need to destroy the nuclear family and replace it with a “village”. That sounds like the kibbutz idea which didn’t work.

Ralph Windsor
Ralph Windsor
4 years ago

Potter, schpotter. They’re kids’ books for Pete’s sake. Can’t UnHerd, if nowhere else, be a Potter/Rowling-free zone.

Stephen Follows
Stephen Follows
4 years ago

‘SUGGESTED READING
Why shouldn’t the curriculum be ‘Eurocentric’?
BY NIGER BIGGAR’

How apt!!

David Werdiger
David Werdiger
4 years ago

“If not now, then when?” was originally attributed to Hillel the Elder in Ethics of the Fathers 1:14. See https://www.sefaria.org/Pir