13 September 2014

Dungeness

14:24 - 16:24 Saturday 13 September 2014

The sea is uncommonly restless. In fact, the sea is distinctly agitated. A stiff wind is stirring up great lumps of water like distant tumuli, and gashes of white are to be seen everywhere. The water is an inscrutable milky turquoise. Gusts of wind fret its surface, while deep waves incessantly scythe into the shore, hurling themselves onto the shingle. There is a perpetual sibilance of breaking and crashing waves, changing only in the ever-shifting sources of sound, and in the relative intensity of bass notes. Wet pebbles glisten in dappled sunlight. Cloud shadows play ducks and drakes over the waves, sometimes streaking across the water like dark ghosts. Out on the horizon the misty forms of supertankers move as imperceptibly as the hour hand of a clock. A buoy, warning of shoals, rocks drunkenly several hundred metres off the beach. Further out a small trawler appears lifeless. Three cormorants, silhouetted against the sky, fly past in formation. Gulls hang on the wind.

People arrive. They arrive excited. However, they are soon bored. They don't know what to do with the place. The abundance of shingle suggests distraction so they pick up and throw pebbles out to sea, or up in the air for others to aim at like skeet. Men with high-tech fishing tackle pit their 420 million years of evolutionary advantage over and against invisible fish, which prove to be too canny, or else simply not there. More people arrive, with yelling children and barking dogs. In time they move on. Whatever they came looking for, it is not here. That is almost a definition of Dungeness: absence, emptiness, there really is nothing here. I notice that the place even has no smell, merely a sense of freshness. Vacancy is the antithesis of what most people want. The correct way to come here is silently, on one's own, with neither expectations nor desires. Only then can one begin to hear the whisper of its elemental message: wind, sea, shingle.

The sun is turning inexorably westward. The inbound tide brings waves lapping ever higher up the beach, presaging the inundation of the shingle shelf on which I am sitting. The as-yet dry pebbles are mostly a warm biscuit in the saturated light of late afternoon, but there are also many chaste shades of grey. The trawler is now inching back to an unseen berth, bucking in the heavy swell like an unbroken stallion. Most of the fisherman have packed up and left - gone home to watch television reports of football matches. A seal surfaces, watching the backs of people as they disappear along the boardwalk. Soon the beach will be as deserted as it should be. Indeed the wilderness that is Dungeness is Britain's only officially-designated desert.