Dungeness Lighthouse
Local highlightA black-and-white tower on the great shingle headland of Kent, near the power stations and Derek Jarman's shingle garden
Dungeness is a vast, flat spread of shingle jutting into the Channel off the Kent coast, one of the strangest landscapes in England — a bird-rich desert of pebbles, fishing boats and old railway carriages. Because the shingle keeps building seaward, each lighthouse here has ended up too far from the water, so several have been built down the years. The round brick tower of 1904 is now open to climb for the view, while the black tower ringed with white bands, built in 1961, is the working light, run by Trinity House and long since automated. Close by stand the two nuclear power stations and Prospect Cottage, the black-tarred fisherman’s hut where the filmmaker Derek Jarman made his famous shingle garden. The King Charles III England Coast Path runs right past on its way round the point.
