The Air Is Full of Information

A walk to the Dungeness sound mirrors

Briefly: June day retreats in Kent, UK | Morgan Harper Nichols on How We Live Now | Live appearances at the Kite Festival, Hay and a very special one at Seven Fables, Exmoor | Hear me on For The Love with Jen Hatmaker | Meet Tony, my bearded dragon (well, he’s actually Bert’s, but I love him).

Hello,

There are some places that just seem to inhabit you. It should be the other way around, but somehow that’s not how it works. These places lodge themselves in your body rather than your mind. You don’t remember them so much as feel their pull on you, as if that lodged particle is constantly trying to repatriate itself. 

I have a few places like this: the Cliff marshes near my childhood home, where you can see the swoop of the Thames as it rushes from London towards the sea; Prawle Point on the south coast of Devon; the muted purples of Exmoor in the autumn. But the place that has called me most often is Dungeness.

It’s not everybody’s idea of a soulful retreat. In fact, it’s a personality test in landscape form. Some people (me) adore the flat expanses of windswept shingle, dotted with huddled fisherman’s huts and decaying boats. Others (not my people) think it’s bleak and ugly, citing the nuclear power station that overshadows it as evidence that it’s Not Nice. I love that it’s Not Nice. There is plenty Nice available for those who want it. Here in Kent, it’s easy to spend your weekends in a succession of elegantly-restored National Trust ‘houses’ (*mansions), buying jam in the gift shops and admiring the well-maintained lawns. That leaves Dungeness to me, and to the other ghouls who find restfulness in a place that seems to cling, white-knuckled, to survival.

I felt that pull again this week. It’s such a nostalgic journey for me, a site of childhood magic. I used to ride down there on the one-third gauge steam trains of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway with my Grandad, who always bumped his head on the way in and out of the carriages (we are a tall family; I have a whole subset of memories of Grandad bumping his head while accompanying me on fun activities - not just the little trains, but also a helicopter ride at the Rochester Air Show and in the cabin of a fire engine at my school fête). My mother would drop us off at New Romney and then pick us up at Dungeness. On the drive back to Greatstone beach, we’d pass Derek Jarman’s famous Prospect Cottage, which I remember looking very strange in the 80s, with its curls of rusted metal spiking out of the ground. Now, it’s a site of pilgrimage for me and for many others, a symbol of the lives that can be made on the edgelands of existence.

We didn’t visit the cottage today, mainly because you have to book in advance and I am not very organised. But I had another mission in mind. We parked the car on a residential street near the Romney Sands holiday park, and walked out across the fields of shingle to find the sound mirrors. 

Built in the late 1920s, these giant concrete ‘ears’ were designed to detect the sound of planes coming across the Channel, offering a fifteen-minute early warning system for an invasion. They were quickly superseded, and were abandoned to the extent that gravel quarries were dug all around them later in the century. But now the quarry pits have been filled with water to create deep blue lakes, and they form an important site for nesting birds. You can no longer walk right up to the mirrors (except on RSPB open days), but you can gaze at them from between the rustling reeds. 

They are, to my eye, beautiful. I didn’t know they existed when I came down here as a child, but now they are part of the pull that this place exerts on me. I was walking here a few years ago when one of the first seeds of Enchantment buried itself in my psyche. Gazing up at the huge concrete bowls, thinking about the invisible sound-waves they were made to catch, a line came into my head: ‘The air is full of information.’ I dutifully wrote it down. At the time, it felt like a fragment of a poem that had no other lines. But it stayed with me, that sense that the air is a conduit for forces that we can’t quite comprehend. It was only much later that I could express it more clearly in my book. The mirrors, I wrote, ‘gather more than sound waves. They condense, for me, a tangle of difficult feelings - of nostalgia, grief, outsidership - and render them back into air again. I can visit them and be quiet for a while, loving the smooth brutality of their concrete, the way they merge into a landscape that can only ever be an edgeland anyway.’

After crunching unsteadily back over the shingle, we drove up to the final stop of the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, right beside the power station. We hadn’t meant to ride on the train, but it was irresistible: I would go there for the scent of the coal smoke alone, or perhaps for the sound of the reedy whistle that echoes across the peninsula like the cry of a rare bird. And anyway, Bert insisted. It’s become as much a part of his landscape as mine.

So we squeezed into the tiny carriage while H drove onwards just like my mother used to, ready to pick us up at New Romney, two stations away. And we trundled off through the peculiar landscape with its yellow light, and its scattering of huts, their gardens decorated with lobster creels and neon buoys, tangles of rope and driftwood. All the memorabilia of an edgeland.

We had the most beautiful day on retreat at Elmely Nature Reserve last week. I realise that for marketing purposes it would be best if I took photos of everyone looking relaxed, but that’s one of the rules I set at the beginning of the day: park your phones; drop out for a snooze whenever you want; and no photos of people.

That last rule is perhaps the most valuable one of all - for just one day, we all get to abandon our ‘outside’ faces and just exist for a while. It’s such a relief not to feel on display. I tend to attract fairly introverted folk to my gatherings, and I think we all quite like to disappear for a while in kind company. Thank you so much to all the lovely folk who came; it was a very special day for me.

For anyone who’d like to come along on 28th June, there are just a few places left - book here. I noticed that some people created their own longer retreat last week by arranging a stay in Elmley’s stunning accommodation - if you’d like to do this, use the code KatherineMay23 for 10% off a Farmhouse bedroom, a Shepherd’s Hut or a Bell tent for the night before and/or the night of the event.

Hope to see some of you there. There are some other live dates below, and look out for me at this year’s Edinburgh Book Festival too!

Take care,

Katherine

Coming up at The Clearing

Monday 19th June, 7pm UK Creative Questions

Saturday 17th June, 4pm - 7pm UK Digital Retreat (The Retreat tier only)

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Live dates

Saturday 3rd June, 11:30am UK Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye. Tickets available here.

Sunday 11th June, 12pm UK KITE Festival, Oxfordshire. Tickets available here.

Saturday 24th June, 6pm UK Seven Fables, Dulverton. Tickets available here.

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