Wilderness

I have a special liking for slightly deserted landscapes with that abandoned dilapidated look going on. Dungeness on the Kent coast has to be my favourite place to experience this kind of atmosphere.                  

It’s a massive coastal ‘desert’ where fishing boats lie stranded on the vast stretch of shingle, slowly rusting and weathering away.      There are plenty of people living here though, in all kinds of houses. Some old, some very smart and new. There’s also the nuclear power station of course (!), just to add to the sense of post-apocolyptic landscape. Derek Jarman created a beautiful, magical garden space in this strange landscape. There’s also a miniature railway taking day-trippers backwards and forwards. But if you walk away from that, towards the sea, there’s just the shingle and lichen and rust and fishing nets. This is my second visit in a couple of years but I still took hundreds of photos. It’s so inspirational I just want to keep going back.

I was careful not to change the scene – I want others to enjoy it as much as I do. But I did collect a very small bag of washed up flotsam from the shoreline – nothing that would take away from the landscape and nothing that too many other people would want, just newly fetched up little things that are replenished every day with every tide. But I’ll hopefully be making use of the some of these things – little bundles of fishing wire and beautifully weathered tiny sticks, if it’s only just to wonder at their beauty. Photos of my small collected flotsam to follow, hopefully soon.