Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway sloe gin

The Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway starts on the outskirts of the picturesque town of Hythe in Kent. Since the late-1920s, it has connected the historic Cinque Port with the smaller seaside towns of Dymchurch and New Romney and, eventually, the vast single split of Dungeness. 

Dubbed ‘the world’s smallest railway’, it leaves Hythe against a background of suburban back gardens belonging to flat-roofed terraced and semi-detached houses of the post-war prefabricated Orlit-type (pebbledashed cream and brown against the harsh seaside elements) and small-scale shops offering fishing tackle, traditional fish and chips and TV repairs. 

At first, the route roughly follows the A259, a long-distance coastal road that links Kent with Hampshire via Sussex. At Hythe, the Dymchurch Road section of the A259 snarls up with daytrippers on a sunny summer’s day, taking sun-lovers away from Hythe’s pebble beaches to the sandy vistas of Dymchurch and St Mary’s Bay. 

A quieter, slower route out of town for walkers, horse-riders and cyclists – punctuated only by the distinctive whistle of the steam train – runs either side of the Napoleonic-era Royal Military Canal, which reaches 28 miles into East Sussex, and runs roughly trackside until it hits the housing estates and bungalows of Burmarsh. Here, the train splits, striking out through flat, sparsely populated Romney Marsh. The bushes that overhang the canal on one side of the path, and separate the walker from the smoke of the train on the other, offer an abundance of blackberries and sloes in the summer and autumn months. The observant walker might also catch a glimpse of an exotic, curious animal or two from nearby Port Lympne zoo or the crumbling Roman remains of the Portus Lemanis fort, which sit beneath medieval Lympne Castle. 

Climb up onto ‘the Roughs’, the low-lying hills that flank the canal – today forming part of the Ministry of Defence’s estate – and dense undergrowth reveals a crumbling sound mirror, a remnant of experimental early 20th century technology designed to defend this stretch of coast against invaders. 

Although today the light railway mainly carries pleasure seekers and the occasional commuter – plus the all-important festive figure of Santa paying a visit at Christmas-time – it too once played an unlikely part in the Kent coast’s frontline defences. 

A typically jaunty Pathé newsreel of 1944, entitled ‘Toy Train Goes to War’, shows tourists replaced with soldiers aboard a special armoured train: during the Second World War, the light railway was taken over by the war effort and placed into the services of Operation PLUTO (Pipeline Under the Ocean), which sent fuel under the English Channel from Romney Marsh to support the allied forces in Normandy. PLUTO infrastructure was cleverly disguised as coastal bungalows; the remaining structures which are in residential use are now known as ‘PLUTO houses’, and are another historical curio of the quirky British seaside.

Sugarloaf Hill sloe gin

The hills of the Folkestone downs – Sugarloaf Hill, Castle Hill, Hoywell, Cheriton Hill and Round Hill – rise out of the gently undulating Kent countryside like green bowling balls, left by some giant en route to the channel. If they were to crouch down, survey their target, flex their arm and roll them across the flat landscape they’d hit the cliff-top town of Folkestone, which diffuses out from the sea in dense avenues of former redbrick mansion blocks and neat semis, rarely letting up to allow in parks or open spaces.

From a distance, the blueness of English Channel intensifies. The steps of an ancient earthwork ripple like the sea below; a more contemporary artwork, the white horse of Invicta, spreads out across the downs. It’s Folkestone’s answer to the Hollywood sign, a bit of modern-day branding for a town which has for many years seemed relegated to a comfort break on the side of a motorway, a stop on the train line between the coast and the capital. Folkestone was hit hard by the twentieth century decline of domestic tourism and the closure of its ferry and hovercraft links.

From up on Sugarloaf Hill the town’s former grandeur as a tourist destination is apparent in a way it might not be at street level. The Grand and the Metropole hotels are lumbering redbrick footprints teetering at the edge of the cliff like non-identical twins. The high-rise offices of the town’s newspaper, the Herald, rise above the empty shops of the town centre. The premises of an insurer that’s long since left town – now a curry house – offer a rare bit of streamlined modernist glamour. A tall Victorian railway viaduct tiptoes across terraced houses, bringing daytrippers in and connecting commuters with better-paid, higher status employment outside. Up high are wartime ditches built to defend the south coast. Below, two Martello towers represent an earlier era of threatened invasion, one pristine, one overgrown. Close up, the town becomes more anonymous, a familiar scene of grey out-of-town retail sheds and the teen haunts of drive-thru fast food joints. Then, the landscape begins to empty out, towards the eerie remoteness of Romney Marsh and Dungeness in the distance.

Straight ahead, the French coastline hides behind a hanging mist or smog, but it’s only a train ride away: Eurostar speeds past, trains and wires sloping across the countryside. Trains no longer stop at the Folkestone Harbour train station, stretching out into the sea like a tentacle feeling its way to the continent, but visitors are now greeted by a text work by Ian Hamilton Finlay at the end of the harbour arm, a legacy of the Folkestone Triennial’s attempts to reinvent and inject some poetry back into the town.

Sugarloaf Hill and its neighbouring rotundas feel like the countryside, but it’s an illusion. Highway cattle roam woods and scrubland, fields of wheat, hay and wild marjoram, and thick passageways of blackthorn bushes, but the motorway's hum is hard to ignore. We pass through these hills in polluting metal boxes – an A-road on stilts goes in at Folkestone and comes out at Dover – and drink its water, from hidden reservoirs. In summer, runners puff up and down and young lovers picnic in relative privacy. Sugarloaf Hill is both of the town and a place to escape from it, to watch it from a distance, to bring a bit back with us, as sloes to mix with sugar for winter sloe gin.

Sound and vision: Hythe's acoustic mirror

On the roughs above Hythe in Kent, on Ministry of Defence land, stands a 30 foot high concrete ear. Borne on a frame of umbrella-shaped iron rods, the disc is angled towards the sky, ready to catch any sounds that come its way. The sound mirror looks out over the flat expanse of Romney Marsh, and miles out to sea (France is just 23 miles away), once assigned the task of monitoring the sky over the English Channel. In 1923, when the mirror was built, it was hoped that in the event of an attack it would pick up the engine noises of enemy aircraft out at sea; an improbable yet innovative early warning defence system. The sounds of the plane would bounce back to the focal point of the mirror, where a waiting operator would be alerted the the presence of planes. Picking up sounds up to 15 minutes before the unaided ear, this bought crucial time for anti-aircraft defences to be activated. This stretch of coast had long been on the frontline of defence against invaders, and the mirror overlooks the remains of the solid, brick-built Napoleonic Martello towers which stud the coastline below; the nearby Royal Military Canal, similarly built to withstand the threat of French attack, is just out of eyeshot.

The mirror worked on a similar concept to the modern TV receiver, except with sound waves instead of radio waves, and was the latest in a series of attempts by the military to harness the potential of sound. Experiments had started during WWI, when the possible dangers of devastating airborne attack was realised, and similar technology included sound ranging to detect enemy guns as well as listening wells. A 1916 account of tests of a sound mirror considered the invention to be a success: “A man 100m distant, reading a newspaper in a low voice was heard perfectly. Airplanes were heard up to distances of 8 kilometers.”1

Precursors to the concrete mirrors were cut directly into the chalk of the Kent hills, and there were experiments with acoustic mirrors at Hythe before the 1923 mirror; an earlier 20 foot cast concrete mirror had been built alongside a building lab, workshop, store and provisions for technical assistance to live on site. An acoustic research station was also built at nearby West Hythe.

When the potential of the sound mirrors was proven – it was claimed that they could capture up to ten times for sound than unaided ears – plans were made for lines of discs to be erected around the coast. A 30 foot high mirror was built at Abbots Cliff near Dover in 1929 and a 200 foot mirror at Denge, near Dungeness, with microphones positioned on the forecourt to capture noise, was completed in 1930 (two, smaller mirrors had also been built at the site beforehand). Building materials were carried along the coast to the latter by the miniature Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch railway, a passenger train which was itself later put to military use during the second world war.

For one reason or another – the inconveniences of wind and rain, increased noise and the advent of faster planes – the sound mirrors never saw action (like the Martello Towers and Royal Military Canal before them). They were abandoned in the 1930s in favour of radar, and orders were made for them to be destroyed.

These orders were never carried out. Today, the Hythe sound mirror has faded into the Kent hills, camouflaged into the landscape and rendered nearly inaccessible by a thicket of head-high thorns and nettles, overrun with rabbits. The mirror is slowly crumbling into the hillside and now resembles a part-eaten biscuit, with a chunk taken out of the side. The structure might have been abandoned and the technology made obsolescent, but the most striking thing about the site today is its extraordinarily rich sonic landscape. The entire hillside hums as breeze sweeps through the trees and long grass, the thistles creak in the wind and grasshoppers rub their legs together. Birds take turns to fill the air with their coded langauge: from high peep-peeps and chchchs to the woo-woo-wooing of the wood pigeon. Sheep intermittently baa in call and response. This natural background noise is occasionally punctuated by the rumbling of a distant, out of sight plane, the distant bark of a dog or the brief revving of a boy racer and sirens on the coast road below.

1. Quoted in Echoes from the Sky: A Story of Acoustic Defence, Richard N Scarth (Hythe Civic Society, Hythe, 1999), accessed in the Local Studies Unit at Hythe Libary

This recording has been submitted to the Field Recording Archive, a new initiative based in Manchester.

For more information on sound mirrors, including sound mirrors at other locations around the country (particularly on the North East coast) visit the website of Andrew Grantham.

'But First Maintain the Wall': Paul Nash's Dymchurch

"Serve God Honour the Queen
But First Maintain the Wall"
Romney Marsh motto

A frontier land facing the English channel, the coast of Romney Marsh has long been the last line of defence against foreign invaders. Strong fortifications — the round, brick masses of Martello towers, a redoubt fort atop a grassy mound at Dymchurch and, closer inland, a military canal — still stand, centuries after they were built to withstand the advances of Napoleon, an enemy who never came. It was this lonely, windswept stretch of coast, on the edge of the country and on the way to nowhere, where the painter Paul Nash chose to recuperate after witnessing first-hand the brutalities and destruction of the first world war, first in the trenches at Ypres and then as an official war artist.

When peacetime came, Nash took a small house, Rose Cottage, in the sleepy seaside village of Dymchurch, Kent. In the 1920s, he produced a series of paintings of the sea wall which stretches around the bay, built to defend the Marsh from the ongoing and ever-present threat of the sea. In front of the wall, at low tide, the sands stretch out into the horizon, a thin surface of water creating a reflective sheet that catches the changing colours of the Marsh sky. The sea’s ripples etch themselves into the sand and small streams spread as if stretching out networks of roots. At high tide, waves churn against the rocks shoring up the wall and submerge the steps that take walkers down onto the beach. The other side of the wall lies Dymchurch, at the edge of the vast, flat Marsh, scattered with sheep, occasional settlements and winding country roads.

It's thought that the sea wall which dominates this stretch of coast dates back to Roman times. In the fifteenth century, a ‘scot tax’ was demanded of all local landowners. If they lived above sea level they were let off — scot free. Later, in the eighteenth century, the wall was repaired with earth and branches from the Marsh. At the start of the nineteenth century, a three mile-long section was constructed using Kent rag stone and concrete. Today, you can see where the wall has been added to and extended in the different shades of concrete, which is flecked brown with the same shingle that collects at the edge of the beach below. The wall curves inwards around the coast, mimicking the rolling of the waves beneath and acting as both a shelter/windbreak for holidaymakers underneath it (from sand, from rain) and a barrier to contain the waves, scooping them up and sending them back out to sea.

On the bleakest of days, the grey of the sea wall reinforces the grey of the sea beneath and the sky above. Nash’s seascapes are often empty and stark, their colours hyperreal (see the dark greens, mustard yellow and forceful black of ‘Sea by Night, Dymchuch/Night Tide' or ‘Wall Against the Sea’, which casts the bay in the type of ominous, sickly glow that only occurs preceding a storm). Forms are simplified and suggested; the manmade and the natural merge into one. In ‘The End of the Steps’, a quiet scene dominated by the bulk of an impenetrable-looking concrete defence, the sharply angled sky looks as much of a construction as the manmade object. In ‘Winter Sea’, a fragmented sea sets out in massive slabs, shaded grey, black and white, towards a faint moon, like the regular descent of stone steps. When figures appear, as in ‘Promenade’, they turn their backs to the viewer, just as the wall turns its back on the village. In ‘Night Tide, Dymchurch’, the solid back of the solitary night time walker appears as just another line in the defence. It's this sparseness that makes Nash's seascapes the most powerful of his paintings: the emptiness of the sands amplifies feelings of solitude and loneliness, emphasising how small the human is in relation to the vast natural world, and brings to mind the strange semi-silence in the air, found only by the seaside, that multiplies the lone walker's thoughts, doubts and preoccupations into a background roar as inescapable as that of the sea.

Nash was of a generation that fought and suffered for the right to make a modern world, to sweep away the old and, out of chaos, build stability. In Romney Marsh, it’s as if time stood still. The view around the coast has changed little, save from the odd holiday park, new residential development and the sizeable bulk of Dungeness power stations in the distance. Nash left Dymchurch after a few years, moving a few miles across the border to East Sussex. The next decade, the world was at war again and Nash painted propaganda, before dying young after suffering years of ill health. The Romney Marsh coast once again played a part in the war effort: the Martello towers and the redoubt fort which, with each decade, grow closer to crumbling into the sea, were requisitioned as lookout points and stationed with anti-aircraft guns.

The war was won but the fight against the sea goes on. In the past decade, the sea wall has undergone extensive renovation, using precast and poured concrete and steel reinforcement, and was reopened in 2011. It’s a battle that will never finish: the metal has already started to rust and bleed into the wall, and the concrete is taking on the sea’s bright green, mossy sheen and dappled black and yellow bloom.

Related but unrelated:

Some Pathe newsreels of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, a miniature railway between Hythe and Dungeness in Kent (via Dymchurch), which was put to use during the second world war:

TOY TRAIN GOES TO WAR

WORLD'S SMALLEST TRAIN DEMOBBED