Many will run for the hills, but others find its squelchy fields, sluice gates and forlorn villages impossibly romantic
What’s going for it? It takes a certain someone to love Romney Marsh. That someone happens to be me. Many will gaze at its landscape of squelchy flat fields, sluice gates and forlorn, atmospheric villages, and run for the hills, as they did for centuries. Some, though, will find them all impossibly romantic and fabulously attractive. The neighbourhood did seem to attract those certain someones: Noel Coward, for instance, or Edith Nesbit, seeking escape in a spot lifted above the day-to-day in its own existential universe. It’s hard to fathom exactly where Romney Marsh gets its particular character from. Its history of malarial marshes and smugglers’ haunts hangs about like a miasma. The blank landscape is peppered with remote medieval villages, astonishing churches, such as at Fairfield, built on the riches of the wool trade, and flat-faced postwar bungalows, staring out to sea. Or perhaps it’s this landscape’s own peculiar geographical history that is so attractive, its sense of temporariness, of the mastery of nature. The fortunes of Romney Marsh and its inhabitants have risen and fallen with the tides, and the accumulation of silt and shingle. These flatlands, just north of Dungeness, were once the English Channel, the now redundant cliffs arcing miles from the sea, from Hythe to Rye. This patch of land has only been lent to Britain by the waves, and the waves might want it back some day.
The case against Bleak. Roads that turn and twist violently, dangerously, with the ditches.
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