In the hinterland beyond the last rows of houses, where the town peters out into farmland and straggling industrial sites, there is a place, wide open, cut across by field boundaries and desire-line footpaths. On one side it ends abruptly at a line of low, chalk sea cliffs overlooking a wide, shallow bay on England’s south east coast. On its landward side it is cut off by the roads and rail tracks that feed the town. It is a place people only really see through glass as they pass through in trains and cars.
On a winter’s afternoon like this, the fields can feel exposed and bleak but, if you time your walk well, the clifftop path will show you some of the most spectacular sunrises and sunsets you’ve seen anywhere. Across the water is a nature reserve, well known for its bird and plant life and even up here, behind the cliffs, you see the occasional sparrowhawk or merlin hunting. But there is no real countryside here. The south east — much of it anyway — is prosperous and overpopulated, land here is rarely afforded the luxury of lying fallow or unused for very long. Everything is managed, owned, financially assessed, fenced off, and mapped out. The few small patches of wilderness that exist are the forgotten, the cut off, the economically unviable.
The terrain here is constantly being overbuilt, redrawn by each generation according to the needs of agriculture, industry and transport. Like many places on this crowded island, the ground has been gone over again and again, used, deserted, used again, and each time the remains of what went before disappear under the surface. It is a place of sinking memories.
The East Kent landscape is distinctive, fluid. A frontier in times of war, an artery in times of prosperity, overshadowed by the capital, passed over by commuters and travellers to the continent. The dominant feature here is the main road out of town, so commonplace you barely register it as a presence. It follows the route of an ancient trackway known as Dunstrete, though you’d never know it now, lost beneath the streetlighting, concrete, petrol stations and bus stops. It slinks across your sightline towards a sprawling roundabout, no different than those around the periphery of any other British town. This one is named after the public house that was once there — converted to a house before sinking into boarded-up abandonment. The pub was, in turn, named after a manor house, long gone.
On the high ground near the junction, overlooking the fields, there was once a gibbet. Criminals and suicides were buried nearby, along with the unbaptised, the unwanted and the lost. Accounts vary as to its exact location, but ghostly lights seen in the area have been blamed, perhaps rather conveniently, for some of the many road collisions that happened in what was a notorious accident blackspot. In an effort to improve safety and accommodate modern traffic, the roundabout was built. A section of the old road is still there, for those, like you, that care to look, hidden in an elbow of wasteland, pinned against the railway, overgrown and going nowhere — an amputated stretch of crumbling tarmac and concrete ending in a mess of rubble and brambles.
The town’s lost souls aren’t the only ones buried out here. Beneath the fields along the road are Anglo-Saxon graves and Bronze Age barrows, scraped flat by the elements and the plough — “lost in vagueness” as the poet, Alasdair MacLean, said of the lost burial sites in his native land. But their traces still cling to the ground as ghosts that appear in aerial photographs during dry summers – circles and lines traced into the sunburnt grass and parched soil.
The buildings of the old farm, to which the fields once belonged, have been converted to a small industrial estate, hidden from sight behind rows of conifers – a banal patch of light industry surrounded by these broad, flat fields. Like the nearby road, it barely merits a second glance, but there has been continuous human habitation here since the start of the Neolithic period. People have lived and worked on this land since Britain’s earliest inhabitants arrived, each century grinding away the traces that came before, leaving precious little on the surface.
Despite this apparent emptiness and the openness of the fields, there is still a sense of something lingering here; seldom noticed whispers of the past. Hidden in plain sight, under a scruffy hedge only meters from the road, a World War Two pillbox nestles in the remnants of its original trench system. Both pillbox and trenches are disappearing now beneath brambles and windblown rubbish. Slowly but surely, they’re being filled in by agricultural spill from the surrounding land.
The ground here is marked by conflict. You don’t need to scratch it very deeply realise that you’re surrounded by the decayed paraphernalia of the war – reminders of the way things could have gone if history had taken a different course. This little concrete bunker was part of a network that defended the coast, constructed on the orders of the of ‘Directorate of Fortifications and Works’ in 1939. After surviving against the elements for eighty years, they are finally succumbing to the forces of progress: most of the pillboxes have been demolished to make way for housing and commerce, and clifftop artillery emplacements have been converted into garages and outbuildings. This is one of the few remaining survivors, still guarding the landward edge of town.
From up here, it’s possible to look out over land that has seen some of Britain’s most important arrivals. Recent archaeological investigations on the land behind the bay have discovered, in the ghost traces of lidar scans, the lost earth banks that defended Julius Caesar’s landing site as his fleet unloaded the Roman invasion force that conquered much of Britain. On the clifftop, a replica longship commemorates the arrival of Hengist and Horsa, legendary brothers said to have led the Anglo-Saxon invasion. And a little further inland, hidden from view by sea-front villas, a cross marks the place where Augustine first arrived, bringing Christianity from Rome. It was the shoreline once, but the retreating sea has been replaced by a rising tide of modern houses that edges ever closer across the fields. It can’t be long before the waves of red-brick semis, box hedges and gravel drives are lapping at the cross’s pedestal.
All of these bones and fragments, roads and buildings, trenches and burials, are cut into rock that itself is a remnant of another time. Thousands of years of human activity lie on top of the Southern England Chalk Formation. Calcium deposits formed from the sediments of an ancient seabed, laid down over millions of years.
Cutting down through the layers, out of sight and almost unknown, is the ‘Seaweed Tunnel’, which burrows through the chalk to the beach below. The tunnel is a remnant, left from the days when farmers would haul up seaweed from the beach to use as fertilizer. It was an important enough commodity to warrant the building of a brick-lined tunnel wide enough to accommodate a small cart. The track that runs through has been deeply rutted by the flow of water down the incline. But, you watch your step and brave the dark for a minute or two and you emerge, blinking on the chalk shelf of the beach with the cliffs at your back.
The tide is receding quickly and plane of chalk beneath your feet, exposed by the retreat of the eroding cliffs, is pitted and riven by gullies creating by the running of tides and rain and the imperceptible grinding of the crustaceans that cover it. Above you, on the clifftop, the buildings of the town peter out like faltering morse code. Below the last line of houses, tumbled concrete blocks skirt the cliffs, protecting the most vulnerable areas from the tides. Among the blocks is fallen debris from eroding gardens and the lost buildings. Around it, seaweed still piles up here, as it always has, in the lee of the cliffs, rotting in the sun.
Rock falls and erosion ensure the perpetual whiteness of the cliffs. It is an image that is strongly associated with the country’s national story — the story we tell ourselves about who we are — entwined with the popular emotional culture and the misplaced nostalgia surrounding our collective memory of war time. The cliffs are skirted with fallen gazebos, planters and other assorted horticultural wreckage from the gardens above, an image of a shrinking ‘Little England’ that seems emblematic of our diminished post-Brexit national identity.
The cliffs here were first made famous in William Dyce’s painting, ‘Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858’. It’s an oddly haunting painting, partially because it is filled with a strange, melancholic light and the manic Victorian fixation on detail, and partly because of the specificity of its title; the record of a specific memory – an engram forever linked to the place, trapping a moment of time.
On the cliff face, just above the shoreline, several ‘smugglers tunnels’ worm their way into the chalk. One of these, known as the ‘Illingworth Cave’ after the man who documented it in 1938, goes hundreds of meters, climbing to the farm above. It is almost a British tradition to link any coastal tunnel or cave to smuggling, but it seems that this one really was used by smugglers; during his exploration, Illingworth found an old-fashioned pistol and the buttons from the uniform of an excise man.
On calm days like this, at low tide, when the belly of the bay is empty, the wet sands and the shallows beyond look like a contiguous sheet of glass. You wade out into the shallows, passing the place where, at the end of the nineteenth century, the body of a murdered sailor was found, and continue across the bay to the river’s mouth. Its slow moving waters snake from the low-lying land beyond, emerging onto the plane of mud and sand, it’s possible to tell just by the smell of the water whether you are standing in river water or the sea. The peaty smells of damp foliage and farmland are carried out into the shallows in a great plume of cold, silty water.
There are revenants out here too. Projecting from the mud you can see the roof of a jeep abandoned to the incoming tide years ago — a warning to other would-be off-roaders of the fickle nature of the sands. Another fifty yards out, embedded in the sand, is the curl of a torn tyre, still wet from the departing tide, black and slippery as one of the baby seals that live in the colony at the river mouth. And, further still, there’s something else —appearing only occasionally, when the tides are right, is the cruciform wreckage of a B17 bomber that ditched here after a bombing raid. Another ghost of the war.
The tide is all the way out now, and the estuary mud traps the colours of the sunset.
This place, its unassuming coastline and its fields on England’s edge, is a palimpsest of forgotten history. The fabric of the past, fading, sinking, is enmeshed in everything around you here, but always just out of sight, and memory.
