Chalk and Dungeness

Anyone walking through chalkland — as for example the hills in the Saffron Walden area south of Cambridge — will almost certainly have noticed that the cultivated fields are strewn with flints, and that most of them are fractured to reveal ‘smooth shell like convexities and concavities.’ (SOD). Flint appears to be a ‘Concretion A more or less rounded mass or nodule of hard material within a bed of softer rock…probably formed by localised concentration of a cementing material [silica in the case of flint]…during the consolidation of the bed…’ Monkhouse and Small. A Dictionary of the Natural Environment. Arnold. London, 1978.

It may be wondered what possible connection there could be between the occurrence of flint in beds of chalk and the shingle promontory of Dungeness — one of the largest accumulations of shingle in the world. Well, the starting point — as it were — is the ever–eroding chalk cliffs of the Isle of White and Beachey Head. Allied to which is another geological phenomenon defined as longshore drift. First, the shingle (pebbles) are formed from the flints which fall into the sea along with the eroding cliffs (and it is the action of the sea which turns the flints into rounded pebbles). Second, the longshore drift — the lateral movement of the pebbles — is caused by the prevailing winds driving the waves obliquely against the shoreline. The movement of the shingle is very gradual, a/ because the backwash tends to drag the shingle straight back down again, and b/ because counter–prevailing winds obviously have the reverse effect. (However, a comparatively localised and extreme storm in the early 1990s, shifted (overnight) thousands of tons of shingle from the beach at Hastings — to the extent that the railing from the promenade to the beach were exposed at the bottom and fell some six feet short of the new beach level. My mother, who lives in Hastings Old Town, said that she could hear a terrific roar, and was utterly astonished at what she saw the next morning.)

Illustrations from John Piper's Romney Marsh, one of the delightful King Penguin Books, now long out of print.

Dungeness is now greatly changed, not least because of its truly massive nuclear power station, and yet it remains an extraordinary place, with remarkable sea flora, and an atmosphere like no other place. Not for nothing has Romney Marsh been called The Fifth Quarter of the Globe; and, in Puck of Pook's Hill, Tom Shoesmith says that it is a 'wonderful odd–gates place...Romney Marsh...I've heard say that the world's divided like into Europe, Ashy, Africky, Australy, an' Romney Marsh.' In other words, the Fifth Continent!

Paul Nash, The Nest of Wild Stones. [Flints] 1937. Arts Council of Great Britain.

Nash lived at Dymchurch, and felt a deep affinity with the marsh. The painting illustrated below includes a building quite extraneous to the landscape, but is otherwise truly a Marsh landscape

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Paul Nash. Nostalgic Landscape, 1922–38. Leicester Museum and Art Gallery