The most healing place on earth
Where I take myself to escape from it all....
I have been away this week. The time felt right. It’s been a month since my father passed and my brain feels chipped and broken, like an old tea mug. The Japanese have a practice they turn to when things need fixing. They call it Kintsugi. They piece together broken things- bowls, cups, vases- with a beautiful gold lacquer. The result is an object that is the same, yet different. Stronger somehow, more layered for sure and totally unique.
This is what I hoped my road trip to Dungeness would do. Fix my soul. Soothe a brain that feels inflamed by what it has seen and felt over the last few months. Create space to think and feel again.
And so I took off for the best part of a week to Dungeness, a strange, desert-like land on the Kent coast, just down the road from where I live in fact. You may have seen pictures of it before. The film director Derek Jarman bought a cottage here in the 1990s when he discovered he was HIV positive. Against all the odds (Dungeness is a harsh, wind-ravaged place) he build a garden that to this day still lives on.
The dogs came with me. We rented a lovey cabin on the edge of the beach. We walked, we ate and for the first time in years I started to work on a book idea that may or may not see the light of day.
The space and peace of a place like Dungeness gives you time to think. Thoughts become untangled. Feelings settle. It is healing and inspiring in equal measure.
I didn’t do much. That was not the plan. But if you do ever head that way- and if you need time to breath, or heal or just take a minute, then I cannot recommend it highly enough. Not in the summer, mind. Dungeness is a winter place, best experienced when the wind howls and there is frost on the sea kale. Before you go there are two exceptional books that will get you in the mood. Derek Jarman’s Garden is my particular favourite, but also Dungeness Coastal Architecture is very good.
The guide books will tell you to go to the bird sanctuary and take lunch at The Britannia Inn. But to be honest, if you get up early enough you will see gold finches on your balcony and crowds of basking cormorants on the water’s edge. As for The Inn, it’s tired and old. Drive to Marino’s fish and chippie down the road in Rye instead.
Instead here are the things you won’t find in any guide book or on aTripadvisor review. These are the things I love doing when I’m there- as well as the places I love to stay. And I think/hope you might just love them too.