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the Ness that endures, with inevitable modifications, today. The guiding principle is randomness. The hundred or so dwellings are scattered about as if they were toy houses thrown by a childish hand. There is no common architectural style. There are just cabins, shacks, chalets, call them what you will. A few of the original railway carriages survive, generally incorporated into expanded residences. Black is the predominant colour and rectangular box the predominant shape. But Dungeness allows for white and splashes of colour, expanses of untreated wood, curves and sharp angles, and the odd old-fashioned caravan.
    Everything is open. There are no drives or fences or hedges or enclosing walls. The gardens – most famously the garden created by the film director and designer, Derek Jarman – have no secrets. Paradoxically – given the absence of visible boundaries between properties – freedom of movement for visitors is severely restricted. The place is peppered with signs declaring that this track or that, or this patch of shingle or that, is private,and warning of the risk to life and limb posed by winches and cables put on the beach to get boats in and out of the sea.
    This fixation with privacy is combined, somewhat awkwardly, with the need to pull in as many visitors as possible to keep the local economy afloat. The lighthouses, the power stations, the terminus of the Romney and Hythe Steam Railway, the bird and plant life, the views and the general weirdness of the place make Dungeness a potent visitor attraction. Most of the cabins are second homes and/or holiday lets. Where once upon a time railway waggons changed hands for a tenner, the going price for a property in Dungeness these days is anything from £250,000 upwards.
    The legacy of the fishing heritage is very visible along the shore. Rusted winches rise from the shingle. Drums of cable lie on their sides, frozen by rust, leaking red onto the stones. The shells and skeletons of old boats are framed against the sky. A tiny handful of working boats survive. I was cycling cautiously around trying to find someone prepared to talk to me about the place when I was hailed from a window by one of the skippers (I think he was also the chairman of the residents’ association, although we did not get as far as exchanging names).
    ‘Do you want something?’
    ‘I’m writing a book about the Channel.’ I tried to explain what it was supposed to be about, then asked him if he lived permanently at Dungeness.
    ‘All my life.’
    ‘Why here?’
    ‘I’m a fisherman.’
    ‘Are you still fishing?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Commercially?’
    (Pitying look) ‘We’re all commercial.’
    ‘Have you been fishing recently?’
    ‘This morning.’
    ‘Any luck?’
    ‘Four boxes of sole.’
    ‘Dover sole?’
    (More intense pitying look) ‘Yes.’
    ‘Where do they go?’
    ‘France.’
    The window shut, which I took to be a sign that the interview was over.
    The ride from Dungeness to the nearest inland settlement, Lydd, is not scenic. The flat road cuts through Denge Beach, which is not a beach at all but a windswept wasteland of stones and scrub, and Denge Marsh, which stopped being a real marsh centuries ago.
    Painters and writers used to rhapsodise about the magic of Romney Marsh and its coast. Paul Nash, who lived and painted at Dymchurch for a while, wrote of watching ‘the eastern sky darken against the dyked flats . . . the strange unity of sea, sky and earth that grows unnoticed at this time and place.’ Ford Madox Ford, who lived near Winchelsea for much of the decade between 1901 and 1910, urged those coming to the Marsh to leave maps behind, or risk losing the ‘sense of magic’. Ford loved the ‘brooding silence, an inconceivably self-centred abstraction’, but even he found the south-east corner between Lydd and Dungeness ‘the Marsh at its most desolate . . . almost soilless, nearly always parched and brown.’
    I pedalled strenuously into an unremitting