Kent – Prospect Cottage, Dungeness

What is written on the house are the first verse and last lines of the John Donne poem, ‘The Sun Rising‘. The house looks out to the east, just up from the tip of Dungeness, so they are fitting. You get the words as if in a whisper: they’re written in black letters against a black weatherboarded wall, so you have to get right up close to read it. The poem is about love and time, and that moment in time when love is the whole world.

We have come to Prospect Cottage, once owned by Derek Jarman and now saved for the nation. He lived in it for less than a decade, but it was his refuge and sanctuary until he died from an AIDs related illness. Jarman was uncompromisingly honest about love, and he is one of those queer giants who broke through prejudices by his visibility and creativity. Anne and I were gutted not to be able to go inside as we had left it too late to book a spot. A couple we spoke to on the day had booked their place in February, so it pays to think ahead. We had to make do with a leisurely contemplative amble around the outside, amongst the curated flotsam, and the hardy flora that surrounds it. 

I took a sneaky peak inside the two front windows that faced the east. On the left was a small but nicely proportioned living room, and on the right was a room almost empty aside from a sideboard and a desk and chair. The chair faced the window and looked out on to the almost spartan landscape, of stones and patchy scrubland. From just in front of that desk outside the house, I told myself I couldn’t see the sea, but perhaps there was thinnest line of viridian green on the flat horizon between land and sky. 

Further down, where Romney Marsh ends (or begins), we could walk along a boardwalk across the shingles, handy for me as the stones kept slipping into my sandals. If you just look out there are just the three states of matter in horizontal ribbons: solid, liquid and gas. Just to our right we had the imposing Nuclear Power Stations, and to our left, with binoculars, our eyes could reach Dover, but straight ahead there was a simplicity, and I could understand some of the reasons why Derek Jarman might have bought such an edge-of-the-world place. From that little spot it was almost silent aside from the waves rasping against the stones. Even the seagulls seemed to have lost their voices.

Afterwards we went over the border into East Sussex to visit the historic town of Rye. Historic enough that when Elizabeth I visited the town, our lunch place was already one hundred and fifty years old. In fact, the cellars are even older, going back to the twelfth century, but the main body of the Mermaid Inn had to be rebuilt in the fifteenth century due to fire. The town of Rye is so old that when it began life, it sat pretty much on the edge of the English Channel but is now about two miles inland because of silting and tidal changes. We only dipped in for a little wander and a bite to eat, but there must be so much to explore here given its history if you had the time.