A shore of shifting shingle

Britain's most unusual seaside resort boasts a barren landscape, abandoned buildings and an imposing nuclear power station. Brian Dillon pays a visit to Dungeness

The desolate shingle spur of Dungeness is stuck to the southeast coast of England like a geological afterthought. It looks, on a map, as if it might easily be swept away by the very forces that have sculpted it into existence for 5,000 years.

As you get close to this stony extremity of the county of Kent, you have a sense of the mutability of the territory. You pass through once thriving villages, now turned to somnolent commuterland, and dying seaside resorts that are at least edgily awake: full of ozone, chips and spite. Where the main road peters to a flinty track, a sign announces: "Dungeness shingle is special. Please care for it while you are here."

In the distance, by the seashore, a fleet of vast dumper trucks (looking like they are being trundled about by some giant toddler) is taking shingle, washed eastwards round the point by the current, and depositing it back on the western side. Dungeness is constantly on the move; it is also one of Britain's strangest, most alluringly ruined landscapes.

As you head onto the ness - the suffix signifies a headland, and is derived from the Old English for a nose - the ground appears unnatural, temporary, improvised. The gravelly surface looks recently reclaimed, as if dumped in a single heap measuring 6 km by 12km. In fact, Dungeness is composed of 600 separate ridges: layers slowly added over the millenniums by the patient crawl of longshore drift. Although its edges are in perpetual motion, at its core the promontory is remarkably dense. The stones are so closely packed that water cannot penetrate this barrier between the English Channel and the flat expanse of Romney Marsh, a little way inland. No rivers cross the ness, and the numerous gravel pits that perforate its western portion are filled with fresh water, only a kilometre from the sea.

This alien agglomeration of stones might seem an unusual place to settle, and a still stranger spot for a summer holiday. But Dungeness has been inhabited for centuries by a fishing community whose traditional black cottages still punctuate untidily the sheltered eastern coast. And while many of these dwellings - augmented by inventive annexes: caravans, old railway carriages, ramshackle and baroque verandas - have lately been bought by outsiders, the fishing industry is far from defunct. Long slipways still extend to the sea; anonymous black sheds brood on the shingle.

Early in the last century, the ancient tracks of the fisheries were mirrored, a kilometre inland, by the construction of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway: a narrow-gauge line with miniature rolling stock, which to this day brings day-trippers down the coast for the most surreal seaside outing in the country.

In 1887, Joseph Castle, chaplain of the Dungeness coastguard, wrote a poem in praise of the austere charms of the place: "No spot, than this, more desolate remains, / Yet with this place, my fondest wishes dwell." Dungeness inspires a distinct fervour among visitors and an almost mystical attachment among those who live there. Its most celebrated resident was the film-maker Derek Jarman, who until his death in 1994 tended a garden that by itself encourages scores of visitors each summer weekend. Jarman's garden is a sparse allegory of the landscape in which it is set. The hardy coastal plants are surrounded by an astonishing array of attractive detritus: bits of old boat; fragments of wood and metal from the railway; nameless, rusted hulks of dead machinery. On the southern gable of his house, Prospect Cottage, Jarman had inscribed John Donne's poem The Sun Rising, with its reference to "the rags of time"; in his garden, he gathered round him the material remains of Dungeness.

Actually, the whole of the headland is like this; everywhere you look there are melancholy fragments of abandoned architecture and tragic, dismembered machines. Occasionally, these have been rescued, curated, turned into heritage attractions: a lighthouse built in 1904 is now a modest museum dedicated to actual and averted disaster. More often, things have simply been left to subside into the stony ground. An old foghorn stands sentinel over the foreshore, looking more like a piece of science-fiction weaponry than part of a warning system. A pair of black huts supports a rotting wooden lookout platform, from which a gang of adolescent starlings makes regular raids on the beach below.

Everywhere, crumbling blocks of reinforced concrete are slowly reverting to the shingle from which they were formed. A walk along the coastal path is like an excursion to some strange, post-industrial sculpture park, full of monuments to the recent past.

The newest of these - although it already looks ancient, a ruin before its time - is the nuclear power station that was built at the western end of the ness in the 1960s (a second reactor was added a decade and a half later). The station is the reason those trucks keep up their interminable circuit, ensuring that the land to the west does not disappear, and the whole installation tumble, catastrophically, if rather slowly, into the sea. (It is not unthinkable: only 15km away is the town of Winchelsea; or rather, New Winchelsea - Old Winchelsea lies just to the east, underwater since the 13th century.) The station dominates the landscape, and from the sea obscures the view of the old lighthouse (it was replaced in 1960). But now one of the reactors is scheduled to be shut down, and this once gleaming vision of Britain's technological future is destined to fade into the palimpsestic memory of Dungeness.

It would be satisfying to think that, once decommissioned, the power station might be left to slump into the stones alongside the rest of the futuristic ruins that dot the landscape. Throughout the last century, Dungeness seems to have been a testing ground for the future.

In part, its geographical location made this inevitable. This stretch of coastline, still marked by abandoned Martello towers and fenced-off military firing ranges, has always been strategically important. In the last year of the second World War, a huge pipeline ran across the shingle and into the sea here, supplying petrol to Allied forces in France.

A decade earlier, some of the eeriest objects in the landscape had been built at the northern end: a series of enormous concrete listening devices, known as "sound mirrors", that were designed, in the years before the perfection of radar, to detect the approach of German aircraft.

The place still seems fraught with danger. This summer, for the second time in two years, a driver on the apparently innocuous, whimsical, miniature railway was killed in a collision at a level crossing. The nuclear power station, which had started to seem a slightly kitsch artefact of mid-century optimism, has in recent years harried the local imagination once more, after the authorities announced that all those living within a few miles would be issued with anti-radiation pills, in case of an unspecified emergency.

As you trudge slowly and noisily across this land now, you might be forgiven for fearing that alien energies are at work on its surface again, breeding weird new life among the ancient stones.

Brian Dillon writes about Dungeness in the summer issue of the Dublin Review. His book In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory is published in October by Penguin Ireland