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.
In the 1960s, Dr Beeching paved the way for the reduction of the British rail network, closing small village stations and branch lines and catalysing the ascendancy of the motorcar as the dominant mode of transport in Britain*.
Some of long-closed lines are now reopening, after decades dormant. Others, their tracks removed permanently and their station buildings now converted into shops and supermarket cafes (as is the case with the former suburban Manchester stations of Levenshulme and Fallowfield), offer cyclists miles of dedicated bike path free from the traffic and aggressive motoring that increasingly chokes our towns and cities.
Manchester’s Fallowfield Loop stretches around eight miles, looping around the south and east of the city. Beginning in inner-city Openshaw in east Manchester and ending in leafy Chorlton in south Manchester, it undulates through the former industrial dormitories of Gorton and Levenshulme, passes picturesque Debdale Reservoir, skirts the boundary of Stockport at Reddish, and cuts through studenty Fallowfield and leafy Whalley Range.
The Loop has the feel of a linear park, offering a backdoor view of the city and its patchwork of official and unofficial green spaces. The Loop itself is an underacknowledged green space. In spring and summer it’s overgrown with branches forming a green tunnel, although in autumn the slipperiness of the accumulated layers of leaves can be treacherous. In winter, the foliage drops right back to reveal numerous back gardens, allotments, recreation grounds, school playing fields, overgrown brownfield sites and industrial land reclaimed as country parks. It links up with other traffic-free routes, too, from the Ashton Canal, with its miles of recently resurfaced towpath, to former branch canals such as the Stockport canal.
The Fallowfield Loop has become a place of community activism and communal litter-picks. It’s also a place of memorial, to young people who have killed themselves. Recently, it’s become a site of protest, with large EU flags unfurled unmissably from road and railway bridges; when removed, they reappear again soon afterwards, imported en masse from China. Pro-EU graffiti sprayed along the path places the UK at the heart of the EU, and the Manchester bee motif is placed centrally within the circle of stars that represent the EU member states; it’s a reminder that Manchester, along with the neighbouring local authorities of Stockport and Trafford, which the Loop passes close-by, voted remain in the EU referendum, in common with several other northern cities. It’s also a place for creativity, from street art murals celebrating the city’s architecture, to hand-written personal declarations (and accusations – ‘Louis K has a tiny penis’). It’s a place to encounter culture, from bicycle theatre troupes offering outdoor Shakespeare performances to public artworks sponsored by the cycle charity Sustrans, which document and draw attention to the flora and fauna of the route. It’s a place of learning and instruction, for small children to gain confidence and practise their bike skills away from the road. It’s also a place for family time: on father’s day, it’s noticeable how the number of men with small children increases.
Not all is benign – once or twice a year the ambush of women or opportunistic robberies make the deadlines, and mounted police undertake regular patrols. However, generally it’s a place of conviviality and sharing: if a cyclist stops at the side of the path, the next to pass will stop to see if all’s okay, and offer help fixing a chain or a spare inner tube.
Although cyclists benefit the most from a safe cycling environment uninterrupted by the frequent stops and starts of traffic lights, the Fallowfield Loop is also well-used by walkers, joggers, dogwalkers, students, and schoolchildren on their way to and from school, as well as shoppers just getting from A to B. It’s a meeting place, too, particularly for groups of teenagers.
These looplines are also fruitful places for the urban forager. Depending on the season, edible mushrooms, horseradish, strawberries, raspberries, cherries, plums, damsons, sloes and apples can all be found along the Loop, whilst in late-summer individuals and groups of people of all ages gather with an assortment of receptacles, from large yoghurt tubs to seaside buckets, Tupperware tubs and carrier bags, to gather blackberries, and offer hints on the best spots.
This year’s damsons were picked along the Fallowfield Loop, in a year that was unusually fallow for apples, yet plums and damsons of varying hues were in abundance.
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.
The Shrieking Violet is three, and issue 19, a bumper edition, can be read online now! The printed version, printed by marc the printers (b/w with f/c cover) will be launched at a special birthday party at Atelier[zero], Manchester's pop-up canalside Olympic village, at 2pm on Saturday August 11. Come along for rowing boats, a ball pool, a 'library with no books', purple (Angel Meadows blackberries) cake and more! Event invitation.
This edition's cover is by Hannah Bitowski, who lives and works in Liverpool and is based in artist-led gallery the Royal Standard. She works in a variety of media, with a penchant for screen-printing and mask-making. This illustration was inspired by a selection of themes Hannah currently draws from: masks, the abstraction of portraiture, facial geometry and the cosmos – particularly inspired by Johannes Kepler, a 17th century mathematician and astronomer who was infatuated with the idea of God existing in geometry, with all answers of the universe coming from there. Even though his theory of the platonic solid solar system was wrong, Hannah thinks the theory in itself, and his attempt to fit geometry into all things, great and small, is enough to warrant praise. This piece attempts to merge the similarities between ritual and reality, myth with maths.
Here's what you'll find inside:
Manchester-based filmmaker Richard Howe continues his series on mental health in the movies by looking at Jesus' Son, directed by Alison Maclean. Richard is currently editing the film Realitease, which touches on mental health. Watch the teaser at https://vimeo.com/45743438 and tweet Richard about films @rikurichard.
I visited the National Football Museum to find out how it compares to Urbis, and see what it has to offer a non-sports fan.
Anouska Smith, a crafter and maker with a beady eye for sparkly things at www.junkieloversboutique.com, offers a guide to her favourite Manchester tea-places. Spot her somewhere in the Manchester suburbs finishing up those cups of tea or trying to avoid the puddles on the side of the road.
Simon Sheppard has contributed an article about a very eccentric fellow named Pierre Baume. Following a career change, allowing him to indulge his passion for modern history, Simon qualified from Liverpool University as an Archivist in 2008 having previously gaining a BA Hons in History from UCLAN. Simon hails from Bolton, but is currently living in Manchester, where he spends his spare time partaking in his new ‘hobby’, Real Ale. To accompany Simon's article, Manchester-based illustrator, musician and DJ Dominic Oliver has imagined what Baume might have looked like...
Liverpool-based writer and journalist Kenn Taylor, who has a particular interest in the relationship between culture and the urban environment, considers some of the implications of the privatisation and fragmentation of our railway system.
James Robinson is a photographer and dabbling videographer. He studied philosophy in Manchester and now lives in London, where he plays bass for indie pop-rock band Being There. James is very proud to provide the Shrieking Violet with its first animal feature. The title, Perros y gatos, was inspired by a sticker album he bought on a school trip to Spain.
Joe Austin has written a tribute to three post-war murals in London and Coventry, by Dorothy Annan, Gordon Cullen and William Mitchell, and highlights the often-uncertain future of public artworks like these. Joe is a qualified architect, originally from the Midlands but a naturalised Londoner for the last 22 years or so. Joe's interests are wide (his blog best illustrates his scattergun mind), but generally revolve around writing, design, architecture, art, culture and history.
Liz Buckley has reviewed Stanya Kahn's exhibition It's Cool, I'm Good in the Cornerhouse galleries. Liz is an Art History graduate living in Salford, and will be starting an MA in Gallery Studies in September at Manchester University.
Godfrey is a rough excerpt from a novel by Matthew Duncan Taylor that may or may not be published next year. Matthew is a journalist who currently works for the Winsford and Crewe Guardian newspapers. He plays in the south Manchester-based bands Former Bullies and Great Grand Suns. Some short stories he has written can be found at matthewduncantaylor.blogspot.co.uk.
Sarah Hill is a Manchester-based artist, and the founder and creative director of Video Jam. Sarah has written an introduction to the project. If you are interested in getting involved, contact her at sarahfrhill@gmail.com.
Issue 19 finishes with a recipe for delicious apricot and poppy seed bread from Shrieking Violet favourite Bakerie in the Northern Quarter.
Download and print your own copy here. Printed copies can also be picked up from the Working Class Movement Library on the Crescent, Salford, and the Bakerie tasting store (the Hive building), Lever Street, Manchester and Piccadilly Records.
To request a copy in the post (free) or to contribute to future editions email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com or join the Shrieking Violet Facebook group.
