memories of dungeness
This week I found an iPhone note with a collection of memories from a weekend in Living Architecture’s beautiful Shingle House in Dungeness last year, and I’ve paired them with a roll of film I took while there.
It’s a house of windows, which is why it’s love at first sight. Sunlight drenches every corner and spreads across its textures, delicious golden right angles of concrete, oak floorboards and white linen.
It’s surrounded by a flat expanse of shingles and scrub, Britain’s only natural desert, stretching across the railway tracks towards the power station and the sea. I get transfixed by bursts of colour on the beach. An old plastic bucket. A bleached monster munch packet (pickled onion). A frayed scrap of netting. The lid of a bottle. Jarman’s blues seeping into the desolate landscape and reflected in the sky.
The wind howls around the corners of the house after sunset. I leave my blinds up and watch headlights winding through the landscape from my bed, their cars invisible in the darkness. When I get a glass of water in the night it feels as though the power station’s outline is leaning through the windows, its glow staining the kitchen countertops from a mile away. Rain splatters against glass. Gorse bushes crouch around our perimeter. It feels both cosy and dystopian, stood inside this sharp-edged glass silhouette in its strange moonscape. Over breakfast the miniature steam train rushes past the kitchen window in a cloak of smoke; someone films from their carriage as we rush from room to room pursuing its progress until it curves off towards the sea and the lighthouse.
Jarman’s garden is quiet and peaceful, wreathed in bushes whose yellow flowers smell of pineapple. We return to our house of angles with hair full of sea breeze, salt in our pores, shingle in the toes of our shoes, our scarves wound round our necks by the wind.
An evening when the sunlight feels almost liquid we church hop across the coastline. Sunlight spilling into the car and sloshing around, casting our shadow across the fields as we snake along the white-capped sea. Splashes of coloured light swim across centuries-old church interiors and bounce blindingly off of leaden panes outside. We visit the island church of St Thomas à Becket, marooned among grazing sheep and marshes and accessible only via bridge. There’s a huge iron key to be collected from the vicarage up the road, and I clomp across the spongy ground clutching it like an urban St. Peter come to the countryside. Curious sheep observe our progress and our lengthening shadows swish across their faces. Ripples spread out across the marsh that surrounds us, and there’s the soft splosh of ducks slipping through the reeds.
On our final morning I stand in the shower, a view out over the pebbly pancake landscape. There’s presumably also a view in but it feels far too divorced from the world to worry about that. I really do agree with Living Architecture that time spent in beautiful spaces surrounded by beautiful landscape can be life-changing.
