Dungeness: where the wild sea kale grows.

We stopped in Rye for sandwiches and to catch the bus that would take us to our destination.

“Watch the tides” a local cautioned us.

“Out there they can drag you all the way around.”

Dungeness is a broad, echoing expanse of flatness spanning twelve square miles. The warning from the local proved true. Impatient and unforgiving, diagonal waves come in urgently around the peninsular, which juts out into the Channel, only twenty-nine miles from Cap Gris-Nez in France but sixty from London. In fact, out at Dungeness it’s easy to forget you’re in England at all, the landscape has an identity unique to itself.

The largest stretch of shingle in Europe Dungeness feels altogether desolate and fragmented, a re-imagined nautical setting for Mad Max. It’s testing underfoot, the uncomfortable sound of rocks grinding together follows you everywhere and clusters of mysterious beach cabbages (or what I have since discovered is Wild Sea Kale) are unavoidable. The whole area seems borderless, contributing to its ‘nowhere’ quality. Fenceless, the beach is littered with dwellings, many belonging to fishermen who’s abandoned boats pepper the shingle. Even the nuclear power station looming in the distance seems as if you could walk right up to it.

We had taken pilgrimage to the home of film-maker Derek Jarman, who sought refuge and rest within the black shiplap walls of Prospect Cottage after he was diagnosed HIV positive in 1986. Like everything encountered at Dungeness, Prospect Cottage has been aged by scorching winds laced with salt, it’s colours muted, worn and warmed by time.

Jarman created a spectacular garden at the cottage, a collage of shingle, rust, totemic driftwood, riotously coloured wild poppies and fauna that glows silver. Weeds and cultivated plants grow alongside each other and harmoniously gather around beach-combed debris and treasure collected by Jarman. Seen through swaying deep-red valerian, fox gloves and cotton lavender, in-scripted on the side of the cottage a line from a John Donne poem reads..

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?

..a sentiment which seems all the more relevant in such a low-lying place where opportunities for shade are few and far between.

Words and pictures by Lauren Emily Wilson.