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At
Hythe station we bought tickets to Dungeness on the tiny Romney, Hythe and
Dymchurch railway. Most of the trains
are drawn by steam engines, although ours, the first of the day at 9.50, was
drawn by a little diesel engine. It
took an hour to travel to the tip of Dungeness, but it was a restful way of
seeing the country (mostly fields of rape). At Dungeness it took a little while to get
our bearings, as it is a haphazard place of bare and vegetated shingle with
scattered wooden houses, an old lighthouse and the huge nuclear power station
dominating the southern shore. The
shingle at the seaward edge was dominated by sea kale and inland by Nottingham catchfly, sea campion, wood sage, common
bird’s-foot trefoil and grey lichens, with regular shrubs of gorse and
prostrate broom (ssp maritimus). The bare environment seemed unsuited to many
birds and we saw few, but the gorse scrub seemed right for linnets, and in
due course we saw one singing on a telegraph wire. There were red stems of dodder here and
there, apparently parasitic on the catchfly. We found one patch of sea pea and a few
yellow horned poppies. We walked east
by the sea from the power station, and then north just after the Britannia
pub, past more wooden houses with shingle gardens, including the one that
used to be the residence of Derek Jarman, with its flotsam sculptures and laid-out trails. There was so much sea kale that we could
easily detect the sickly sweet scent of its flowers. After a lifeboat station there was the Pilot
pub, and the start of brick houses at Lydd-on-Sea. It was a strangely scattered community. The scenery was uniformly stark,
particularly towards the sea where there was little vegetative cover, but
there was a wide variety of plants scattered around, including red valerian,
hare’s-tail grass and greater quaking-grass. The road was busy, but it was hard to walk
on the unconsolidated shingle further away from it. We passed Romney Sands holiday camp, by now
in steadily increasing drizzle that became heavier rain as time passed and
remained throughout the day. We had to
have lunch sitting in a bus shelter! At
Greatstone-on-Sea there was a narrow line of dunes on the shingle, with a few
more plants, such as sea holly, but the hare’s-tail grass had colonised
almost everywhere. A plant that we did
not recognise was just beginning to form flowers and turned out to be
blanket-flower, known to be naturalised here. Unfortunately we were too early for its
large colourful flowers, but we could smell its sweet-scented leaves. Another species with a distinctive smell was
curry-plant. We crossed to the shore
and walked the beach, recording shells and noting washed up moon jellyfish
and a flounder, until the shingle drew in again at Littlestone. Here in mown grassland we found three
medicks – spotted, bur and toothed. Just
after this there was some sand catchfly beside the path below a few
beach-huts. Here we began walking a
track between the golf-course and the shingle shore, where the dominant plant
was often rough clover, but we also found haresfoot and knotted clovers. At
St. Mary’s Bay a proper sea-wall started and we had to walk on concrete the
rest of the way, sometimes past building-sites where they were renovating the
sea defences. After Dymchurch the
MoD’s Hythe Ranges prevented any further access to
the shore and we had to walk on a pavement beside the busy A259 and the
incessant noise of traffic and police sirens. After Palmarsh we took a slight detour via a
side road to the Royal
Military Canal,
where we could at least walk the rest of the way into Hythe station along the
canal bank, softer to the foot and greener to the eye. There were leaves of frog-bit in the canal. We arrived back at the car park at 5.20pm,
with just an hour to spare before the car park was due to be closed. We drove back to Sandgate, to the Ship Inn. Although we had intended to eat in, the
landlady had run out of food after a rush over the bank holiday weekend! Fortunately there was Tinto Tapas Bar only a
few doors away and we had a very decent meal there.
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Sea
kale
Sea
campion
Sand
catchfly
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The
train at Dungeness (its size is clear above)
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Dungeness:
scattered wooden houses
Dungeness
nuclear power station
Derek
Jarman house
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