Exploring Exo – the headland of Dungeness

Dungeness in the fog – how it’s best discovered . . .

My novel Exo is set at the end of the world and to my mind if the end of the world could be any place on Earth, then you couldn’t do much better than Dungeness.

This small corner of the Kent coast in southeastern England can be and has been variously described as a headland, a desert (refuted by the UK Met Office), an artists’ enclave, a nuclear hinterland, a nature reserve, a site of special scientific interest and an on-beach fishing harbour. I suspect it’s only me who thinks of it as a contender for the end of the world. But let’s look at the evidence, shall we?

I first visited Dungeness in 2004 and was so transfixed by what I encountered that I found its stark beauty wholly possessing my imagination. There, or at least soon after my visit, an idea for a story took shape, involving many of the elements i had encountered on that initial visit.

When I write a blurb for a book, I’m always looking for the points of tension or the parts of the story that are in conflict with one another. This is where the drama and intrigue are to be found. This, I believe, is what draws most readers to stories – the unresolved tension.

And what immediately strikes you about Dungeness is that it composed of a number of contrasting elements, many of which ought not to belong together, or which should somehow be in conflict with one another. Because Dungeness for all its starkness is not one thing, but it is many different things – a kaleidoscope of clashing aspect vying for your attention. The landscape is both barren and bountiful. The space feels both empty and occupied. Nature jostles with industry. This pebbled expanse, resembling a large beach, seems the possession of both land and sea – even as the air itself, particularly on foggy days, makes its own transgressive claims. Above all else, Dungeness is a threshold, a zone trapped permanently between one place and another.

So what are those elements that first excited me?

First, there is the shingle foreland itself, whose pebbles shift and rasp beneath your every step. Grasses, sea kale and a variety of native and non-native wild flowering plants are scattered across the shingle, somehow leaching sufficient nutrients from falls of rain and the worn stones.

Fishing boats, beach, sea and visiting explorers

Close to the sea, where the beach either slopes sharply or descends in a series of humped ridges, depending on recent wave activity, are to be found the beach-launched fishing boats. These might be wooden or fiberglass. A good number of these boats are still in use, while others have been long abandoned and are decaying picturesquely. The older wooden boats are not much bigger than large rowing boats but others can be significantly larger. How, you ask yourself, do the fisherfolk get these boats into and out of the water? The answer lies in the nearby rusting tractors, bulldozers and winches. Many boats have strips of metal protecting their keels as they are hauled or pushed up and down the beach. The boats and machinery are exposed to the elements all year round and looking at the rust and rot you are sometimes hard pressed to tell which of it is still in use and which has simply been abandoned and left to fall apart.

Weather-board house and garden

Outnumbering the fishing boats are the houses. Nearly all are single storey structures and a number are made of or at least covered in dark weatherboard so that they resemble elaborate huts. The most famous of these is the former home of the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman – Prospect Cottage. The buildings line Dungeness Road, which ends at the narrow-gauge railway station, the Britannia pub and a nuclear power station. Once, this was a fishing hamlet, but nowadays the houses are more likely to be occupied by artists seeking both solitude and inspiration. (These days, you can even get some pretty good seafood at the Dungeness Snack Shack and nearby the more traditional Pilot Inn.)

There are two lighthouses – the imaginatively named Old Lighthouse and New Lighthouse. The more modern one still functions – with its bulging cylindrical top it looks to my mind like an Ariane-4 rocket. The older one, from the turn of the last century and no longer functioning, you can visit, climbing the spiral stairs up its hollow interior to stare out at the world through its distorting glass lenses.

Why have one nuclear power station when you can site two?

And then there is our latest attempt to stamp our presence on the landscape – the nuclear power station. In fact, two nuclear power stations – Dungeness A and Dungeness B – both now in the process of being decommissioned. Crowding close to the sea, these vast brutalist concrete boxes ought to be a terrible blot on the landscape and yet somehow this group of clean, grey industrial slabs and the accompanying towering pylons striding out westwards do not look like strangers in this desert landscape. Seawater to cool the power plant used to be pumped back out to sea, where it could be distantly seen welling upwards. Sea birds would gather here attracted either by the warm waters and, I imagine, an abundance of underwater life triggered by the heat. 

Walking along the shore’s littoral zone I’ve sometimes found considerable detritus offered up by the sea. The remains of starfish, crabs and clams.

Finally, there is the sea itself. Because the headland is a triangle jutting into the English Channel, there is a stronger than usual coastal sense of being surrounded by water. You certainly feel exposed to it. Perhaps it is this feeling of vulnerability that led me to the idea that the sea itself could be physically threatening. Which historically, of course, it has long been considered, especially by fishermen and their families. Now, in the twenty-first century, and for very different reasons, we have gradually come to accept that the sea is once again a danger to human life.

Humans have always been both attracted and repelled by the sea. It is an often-violent medium to which we air-breathing ground-walkers are hardly suited. And in the UK at least it is too cold to enter comfortably for most of the year. Yet historically the riches offered up by the sea – hunting, trading, raiding or making war on those on its far side – meant that we were drawn to it time and again. We still are. There’s treasure here if you’ve the courage to get out there and find it. Threat. Conflict. Opportunity. The tensions and contradictions of the sea are the stuff of great stories. Just turn to Arthur Ransome, Joseph Conrad, Patrick O’Brian, Herman Melville or C. S. Forester. 

I grew up on a smallish island in the English Channel. Getting to and from the island, as well as the availability of much of our food, was determined by the weather and the conditions of the sea. We depended on the sea and yet it always felt to me like something other, a force with a life and mind of its own. There is something metaphorical about the sea’s immensity. We originally came from the sea and now as sea levels rise it is coming back for those of us who live on the coast. Perhaps the land is like life itself – a brief refuge from the vast emptiness of non-existence. We are briefly washed up upon the bright islands of our lives but in the end we will all return to the dark depths of the sea.

So it is that I found the contradictions of our relationship with the sea and the landscape of Dungeness itself seemed to coalesce into an idea. Here, I speculated, lay a future.

The decaying fishing boats became rusting rockets.

The old lighthouse became a temple long abandoned by its worshippers.

The wooden huts became the shacks of the few, last inhabitants eking out a living on a dangerous shore.

The inhabitants themselves were the denizens of a lost, abandoned world.

The power station became a research facility studying what had happened here.

The shingle headland became a vast plain and a zone of danger and distrust.

And the sea itself was transformed into an incomprehensible, annihilating entity that drew all life into it and from which no one and nothing had ever returned.

So, if you’re wondering how the world might end and what it might look like, head to Dungeness. There’s even pretty good fish and chips.