beach landscape at dungeness

Under grey skies on Romney Marsh. This view is from the road that runs through the shingle to  the cluster of buildings erected around the old lighthouse. All now dwarfed by the power station. I am particularly fond of this view of this barren landscape – only to be found on this side of the road.

Directly opposite on the other side of the road sits Prospect Cottage, home of Derek Jarman until mid 1990’s. Each year this humble shack receives a new finish. In the grainy light, the poem by John Donne, on the exterior facade is only just visible. A few folks had set up their stools and were busy capturing the composition of house within garden and, within setting, in water colour. There are no boundaries to land in this environment and you can move restfully around the ‘garden’ of the cottage to view, admire and breathe it all in. Most of the planted species are indigenous and native material will also pop up from wind blown or bird dropped seed.

The impact of the surroundings completes the picture – in an informative way and also strangely in an enigmatic visual sense. This was a unique ‘garden’, now much copied and mostly badly.

In the 28 years since the initial visit, I have witnessed considerable changes to the habitations along the road. Over the last 5 years, almost complete gentrification has happened. Expensive vehicles are parked outside the neat refurbished houses. Fluffy garden areas are now established – all looking totally false in contrast to the original at Prospect Cottage.

The native planting where man doesn’t interfere still retains a quite specific feel and I fell in love with it all over again.

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys and sour ‘prentices,
Go tell court huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shoulds’t thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long;
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me,
Whether both th’Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me?
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, ‘All here in one bed lay.’

She’s all states, and all princes, I;
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here, to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere. John Donne The Sunne Rising