In 1986, a year before The Last of England was released, Jarman purchased a home by the sea. Prospect Cottage is a small wooden house clinging to the shingle ribbon at Dungeness. The walls are black, the door and window frames gorse yellow. An excerpt from John Donne’s “The Sun Rising” is picked out on one wall: “Sawcy Pedantique wretch, goe chide / late schoole boyes and sore prentices…” Today the cottage has become something of a meme. Its neat proportions and stark location do well on Instagram, and you can buy a Prospect Cottage model kit for the aspiring hermit in your life. Jarman, always suspicious of the heritage industry, would laugh.

Dungeness is a place for fishermen and ascetics. Stone, sky, sea. The place is bound by water, with the English Channel to one side and the flat weirdness of Romney Marsh to the other. Dungeness is England stripped naked. Everything is on show. The little cottages crouch in the lee of a defunct nuclear power station and the horizon is swagged with power lines. Migrants arrive in rubber dinghies every summer now. What do they make of it? Relics of industry, toy houses, the click and shift of shingle beneath their feet. Is this what they expected?

The Last of England was a response to the paint-by-numbers neoliberalism of Britain in the late Eighties. It was also the record of a personal apocalypse. Jarman was dying from Aids and so were most of his friends. He feared that England’s memory was being wiped, just as the collective memory of his own generation was erased by death. And what was left? Cold hearths and dead oaks. Some scenes, in which balaclava-clad men brutalise emaciated prisoners, could be spliced into a nuclear war film like Threads with ease. The departure of the household gods is not an end, but a chilling new start.

A different man might have retreated to postcard England. A Cotswolds bolthole, perhaps, all buttery stone and Britain in Bloom awards. Instead he chose Dungeness. The bleak landscape pulled at him, as did the austere charm of Prospect Cottage. Although he still spent time in London, the city had become a degraded husk. Hampstead Heath seems to have been the only place in London he enjoyed, largely for its Arcadian atmosphere after dark. The rest of the capital was a drab blend of drunks and traffic.

The southern countryside wasn’t much better: “Poor ruined Kent with its ugly commuter towns, there every field and hedgerow is under siege.” Dungeness was different. While the busy-bodies had arrived — Jarman mourned the appearance of unnecessary fences and the replacement of the red phone box with a modern glass version — the place retained its essential character. Like Hampstead Heath, Dungeness had texture. It was still England.

Dungeness seems to have fed his growing apocalypticism. It is a provisional place. Jarman would have been amused by the recent discovery of a Tudor ship’s hull 300 meters inland, evidence of the coastline’s shifting nature. Between 1989-1990, Jarman worked on the journal later published as Modern Nature. The book is full of change and decay. It’s a record of loss in real time. In one passage, he delivers an elegy that would have been familiar to any Anglo-Saxon: “Now throughout the world stand windblown halls, frost-covered ruined buildings; the wine-halls crumble, kings lie dead, deprived of pleasure, all the steadfast band dead by the wall.”

There’s something off about Dungeness. He learns that the drinking water is suffused with lead and aluminium. The death of a grass-snake is an omen. Military exercises wake him in the middle of the night. The nuclear power station is “a 20th century Babylon”, its interior a “shambles of rusting pipe and escaping steam, with little men running hither and thither with spanners and screwdrivers”. Jarman noted that rising sea levels would swamp Dungeness within 100 years. He pictured the power station being washed away in a Ballardian rush.

This strange place has much in common with the world depicted in The Last of England. The film is titled after a painting by Ford Madox Brown. It depicts an emigrating couple taking one last look at England from the deck of a ship. Their gaze is fixed on coastline that we cannot see; perhaps Jarman imagined them watching Dungeness sink into the haze.

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The Ness is blasted and surreal, a settlement cobbled together in the backwash of a great disaster, just as the film is cobbled together from images of despair and anarchy. In one sequence, Jarman filmed Tilda Swinton on the strand. She moans and twirls next to a pyre while the power station sits black behind her. This was the country that he wanted to capture. Not the hay wains and stately homes, but what would be left when England finally lost her memory. A land of cruelty, fire, and Little Chef franchises.

And yet things aren’t quite so neat. The film contradicts itself. In recording England’s mythological drain, it creates symbols that project great mythic force; the cadaver leaps up halfway through the autopsy. The final scene, where robed figures paddle a boat out into a torchlit sea, rocked by waves and the grain of Super 8 film, can be read as weary retreat or bold foundation myth. Even at his most despairing, Jarman was an accidental optimist.

The way he lived at Prospect Cottage also smacks of optimism. Pessimists plant nothing, and Jarman was a great plantsman. Gardens are ephemeral, and so the perfect medium for a place like Dungeness. This was no mean feat on dry shingle bleached by wind and salt. The plants were hardy and low: sempervivum, fennel, santolina, sea kale, rosemary, iris, some hopeful roses. Jarman constructed miniature stone circles and driftwood dolmens, turning the shingle desert into a 20th century Seahenge. These sculptures looked good ­— the shoreline is dominated by horizontals, you need some punchy verticals to frame the view — but there was far more to them than that. Jarman knelt on the ground and sculpted ancient forms as England withered behind him. Perhaps he was trying to tempt the household gods home.

Jarman died 30 years ago. Although his personal apocalypse came to pass, England staggers on for now. The Last of England is a powerful account of a nation’s spiritual decay, but the worst consequences are confined to celluloid — the men in balaclavas aren’t in charge just yet. Prospect Cottage and its garden were lovingly tended by Jarman’s partner, Keith Collins, until 2018. Their little scrap of shingle has been recorded in two handsome volumes and is well worth a visit, if only as a reminder that if you want England back, all you have to do is re-make it.

Dungeness is an odd sort of place, to put it mildly. To get a sense of what it is like, think of an artists’ community in a near-desert of shingle, consisting of houses built from driftwood and old train carriages, all on a storm-battered headland in Kent, with a globally unique ecosystem, a tiny steam railway, and of course those two gigantic nuclear plants dominating the view to the south.

Its remoteness and unique atmosphere has proved irresistible to artists, most famously the film director Derek Jarman, who moved to a cottage there after falling ill with AIDS in the 1980s. One of my favourite painters, Eric Ravilious, executed a striking picture of the old lighthouse in 1939. The year after that, Dungeness Point was the scene of a darkly comic vignette of wartime history: two Nazi spies who were landed there blew their cover by attempting to buy alcohol before noon at a pub in nearby Lydd, and were later hanged.

Had there not been a war on, it is easy to imagine that the landlady who reported Herr Meier and Herr Waldberg might not have been such a stickler. Romney Marsh, of which Dungeness forms the southern boundary, had for many years the reputation of a place where the law’s writ ran a little unevenly.

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries smuggling was rife. It is one of the closest points to the continent on the whole English coast, conveniently furnished with numerous gently sloping beaches, and in past centuries was inaccessible and hard to navigate for the stranger. Rudyard Kipling, who lived not far away, at Burwash on the Sussex Weald, contributed to the image of the Kentish smugglers as charming rogues with his famous poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’:

“Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie —
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!”

Another builder of the romantic legends was the author Russell Thorndike. He wrote the Dr Syn series, splendidly preposterous old-fashioned swashbucklers about a mild-mannered Church of England cleric, the Vicar of Dymchurch, who moonlights as The Scarecrow, feared chief of a gang of smugglers. They lead the Revenue a merry dance over the course of seven novels. I was introduced to the books by my father, who is himself a mild-mannered Church of England cleric living on Romney Marsh, but not as far as I am aware a notorious brandy smuggler.

People who have heard of the Marsh are often familiar with its two most famous institutions. Firstly, the Romney breed of sheep, which is now farmed all over the world, from South America to New Zealand, where it makes up more than half of that country’s 40 million-strong flock.

And secondly, the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, the 1920s brainchild of millionaire enthusiasts Captain Howey and Count Louis Zborowski, and now a popular attraction for tourists from all over the world. Its fame has spread considerably — there is a Shuzenji Romney Railway in Japan, closely modelled on its English namesake. During the Second World War, a special armoured train ran on the railway’s line, acting as a sort of mobile anti-aircraft unit; it scored only one success, but certainly looked good in propaganda newsreels. Indeed, the entire line was taken over for military purposes, which was hardly surprising given that the enemy lay less than 30 miles away.

The proximity of Europe has been pivotal in the Marsh’s history. Those original continental troublemakers the Romans had a port at Lympne, a village which now lies some distance from the shore following the retreat of the coastline. You will still occasionally hear the chauvinistic local legend that William the Conqueror initially attempted to land near New Romney, but was seen off by the hardy locals, and only then tried his luck further west at Pevensey, where he made his successful landing against the (by implication) soft and irresolute Sussex men. The tale has a kernel of truth: it seems that some of the Bastard’s men did disembark at New Romney by mistake and were rebuffed, but it was a small scale engagement.

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The village that imagined a godless world

By John Gray

Long after the ructions caused by the Normans, the French continued to be a source of unquiet, as well as informal duty-free booze, on the Marsh. From 1800, the coast was heavily fortified against a feared Napoleonic invasion, with the building of the Royal Military Canal at the foot of the surrounding hills to delay any invading French army, and a chain of small gun-emplacements called Martello towers, alongside larger forts at Dungeness and Hythe. Later, the district was expected to be one of the sites for a Nazi invasion; inspection of captured plans after the war confirmed that this had indeed been the enemy’s intention. The field next to my parents’ house contains a concrete bunker dating from this time, presumably intended to defend the road into town from the beach.

Romney Marsh is not nowadays marshland as most people would imagine it. There is no great Grimpen Mire waiting to entrap the incautious traveller, and no squelching bog. For some centuries, most of the Marsh has been grazing pasture. This has not always been the case: well into the second millennium AD, what is now the Marsh was a mix of shallow tidal lagoon and true marshland, with the River Rother snaking through the southern parts.

The lay of the land was radically altered by a series of fierce Channel storms in the second half of the thirteenth century, culminating in the notorious Great Storm of 1287. Old Winchelsea, a substantial place with an estimated population in the thousands, was entirely obliterated and most of the island on which it stood submerged, Atlantis-like, by the surging sea. The modern town of Winchelsea, founded by the survivors of this event, stands on top of a hill: they weren’t taking any chances (although their eventful history wasn’t over — Winchelsea suffered French and Spanish raids during the Hundred Years War and was burned by the French in 1360).

The aftermath of the Great Storm was tough for the place in which I grew up, New Romney. Not only was it severely damaged but, having been a thriving port at the mouth of the Rother, the town’s economic fortunes also declined rapidly after 1287, as the course of the river had shifted well to the south, rendering the harbour useless. Whether the storm itself was directly to blame, as local folk history suggests, or whether the lower Rother and the harbour had become gradually choked with silt and shingle over many decades, and the storm was simply the last straw, the town became something of a backwater.

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The fluctuating shape and extent of the Marsh, and changing patterns of land use, have resulted in numerous once thriving communities being abandoned. Within a day’s walk of my parents’ house, there are at least four ruined churches situated far from any modern settlements. One such example is the dramatic All Saints, which served the long-extinct parish of Hope.

Not all these lost communities vanished as suddenly and dramatically as Old Winchelsea. Broomhill, close to Dungeness, gradually became uninhabitable due to the encroachment of the sea in late medieval times. Many villages and hamlets were badly affected by the Black Death or by the malaria which seems to have lingered well into the eighteenth century.

Other relics reflect the more recent past. Close to the trackbed of the partially dismantled Appledore-New Romney branch line, a casualty of the Beeching Terror — the rails remain in place as far as Dungeness, for the sole purpose of transporting spent nuclear fuel — stand three very strange concrete structures. One is a large convex vertical wall, measuring about 200 feet from end to end. The other two resemble giant satellite dishes, set in sturdy stone bases. One is about 30 feet in diameter, the other about 20 feet. They are acoustic mirrors, the legacy of interwar experiments with creating an early-warning system for enemy aircraft crossing the Channel. Similar installations survive at Hythe, and on the cliffs near Dover, but they were never used in anger, having been superseded by radar by the mid-1930s.

The mirrors contribute to the somewhat eerie beauty of the Marsh, with its long unimpeded views and big skies. Perhaps too the precariousness of the Marsh’s existence adds a certain drama and savour to the contemplation of its landscape. After all, most of the land between the Royal Military Canal and the Channel is at or below sea-level: everyone who lives on the Marsh depends on the coastal defences. In the Dr Syn books, Russell Thorndike quotes a fictional though highly apt motto for the Marshfolk: “Serve God, honour the King, but first maintain the Wall.”

It’s hard not to draw lessons for what we might think of as our uniquely modern dilemmas: the inescapability of some kind of entanglement with our European neighbours, however secure we may feel in our island redoubt; the imperative for humility and flexibility in our dealings with the inexorable forces of nature; and the need to accept inevitable change to maintain the broad shape of a way of life.