A Road Trip to the End of the World

Sparks through the rubble. Traipsing across Dungeness' ascetic landscape, you are overwhelmed by a sense of rubble, that these scree-like shingle shards stabbing below foot and those petrifying fishing huts seemingly stuck stagnant in time are the rubble of something that once was, the forgotten vestiges of bygone human life. Listen closely and you may hear their voices carrying on the ocean breeze, see their spectres incarnated in the frantic eye of a seabird but obliviously passing by. What happened here? This land that nature reclaimed, is reclaiming. The brutalist skeleton of a nuclear power station that haunts the headland like a great apparition seems a clue, but an unhelpful one at that. An abstract piece to an even more abstract puzzle. What happened here?

Dungeness is an oddity in the verdant Garden of England, a seemingly sickly wart growing from its underfoot on the south-eastern coast of Kent. A road trip here, to one of Britain’s most isolated corners, feels like a road trip to the end of the world, to a time without time. The presence of not one but two nuclear power stations that slash into the otherwise desolate skyline only enhances this apocalyptic aura, the remnants of a British fervour for nuclear energy that was lost somewhere in the quagmire of the Cold Era and its looming promises of atomic catastrophe. But these two beasts - whose monstrous bodies evoke something of the twin giants Otos and Ephialtes from Greek myth - are deceptive in their brooding. Because murderous they are not. Rather, like much of what seems inhospitable, uninhabitable, within the alien world of tiny Dungeness, it is actually these power stations that breathe life into the landscape, and not just in their capacity to inject masses of energy into the National Grid.

Because, despite the desolate terrain, Dungeness is one of the most fertile enclaves in the UK. Over six-hundred species of plant can be found here, a third of all those found in Britain. Among them are varieties almost non-existent in the rest of the UK, as if the plants themselves have fled to this barren corner of Great Britains in a do-or-die effort to escape encroaching mankind: the vibrant petals of red hemp-nettle, the ghost-like flowers of the Nottingham catchfly, or the sunbeam hues of the yellow vetch. These endangered flowers glimmer like jewels, sparks even, scattered through the shingle, nestled in the rich plant colonies that have risen from the ground here, as if by miracle.

The fauna is just as diverse and just as fascinating as the flora. The latter begets the former, plethora species attracted to Dungeness by the vegetal capillaries that course through it. One example is the Sussex emerald moth, whose silken green wings are found only in Dungeness, where it nestles between the patches of sea carrot to lay its caterpillar eggs. In the various flooded freshwater pits of Dungeness you may also find some seemingly primitive beasts, these tiny oases holding some of the UK’s most stable populations of oddities like the great-crested newt and the medicinal leech.

However it’s the nuclear power stations that are perhaps the most generous lifegivers perched on the headland. This is because the hot waste-water that they regurgitate back into the seas below has created a spot amongst the waves that local anglers have named “the boil”, its warmer temperatures attracting myriad sealife and seabirds who find refuge in this special microclimate. Patches of early spider orchid are similarly scattered along the peripheries of these nuclear monuments, the rare plant seemingly taking solace in the scars their unnatural presence have left on the land (one of the few other places the early spider orchid grows in the UK is near Dover, on the chalk spoil dumping grounds left during the construction of the Channel Tunnel, suggesting a taste for the disturbed). Man meets nature here in beautiful, if not somewhat tense, harmony, modernist monstrosities harbouring new life within this forgotten natural paradise.