Dungeness

Dungeness is a place, and one with a very strong sense of place, but it should also be a term denoting a quality, a state of being – dungeness. Otherwise a raw, bleak, triangle of scruffy shingle sticking out into the English Channel on the western periphery of the delightful and scenically varied county of Kent. That part of the Garden of England where only sea kale grows.

When I visited Dungeness last Thursday – perhaps the fifth time in my life that I’ve been there - it confirmed itself for me as one of my favourite places in England, or indeed anywhere. It possesses a unique fusion (or arguably fission) of traces of human experimentation and habitation combined with wild barrenness, a powerful paradoxical enabler of life-affirming solitude. Here are to be experienced manifestations of pure energy – the ambient hum of the nuclear industry, the roar of the wind, the swooping and screeching of seabirds, the crashing of sea upon shingle, the visions of individual minds. Ways forward only discoverable amid emptiness. All kinds of vaguely scientific artefacts probe the vast sky (with towering friendly cumuli on the day I was there) – lighthouses, telegraph poles, electricity pylons (some of them disturbingly one-armed); and at a lower level the tiny trains of the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch, the concrete relics of wartime, and the random scattering of make-do dwellings of individuals seeking isolation and escape.

Thus there are constant visual reminders of and references to human society, while the elemental nature of the place provokes one into distancing oneself from “it all”, into world-rejection. In crowded, pressured, south-east England this is the last great wilderness, where one can retreat into pleasurable solitary contemplation, comforted by the wind howling in one’s ears. Here is an escape from all the cleverness and intellectualising of modern man, the endless wittering of “commentators” and people who know better (yes, and bloggers too), the antisocial meddlings of antisocial media, the snooping of the thought police, all the hatefulness and bickering of people with agendas; escape from that vast army of useless and otherwise unemployable people whose job it is to tell you how to live, how to think, what words you’re not allowed to use this week, what to believe, whose career to destroy today. Here one can practise misanthropy without harming anyone. In fact, one can conclude safely that misanthropy is a reasonable response to the present day world.

 
Dungeness is a place – a quality – which I imagine England used to possess, a land in which people could do more or less what they wanted to, inventing their lives as they went along. A land where imposed permissions and instructions were unknown, where control and monitoring were unimaginable, where busybodying bureaucracies had no place, a land devoid of jabbering electronics and moronic noise and … civilisation. Just the wind in one’s face. Desolation ecstasy. No, please don’t bother me with the downsides and please don’t tell anyone about it. 

Dungeness, a place, a quality, and a reminder of the freedoms we have lost.