Dungeness: Sounds in the Darkness

"We’d joked about the possibility of our trip ending in some sort of stabbing spree"

A pilgrimage to Dungeness' sound mirrors

We stand on the bank of the flooded gravel pit, quietly gasping at the thick summer air as we struggle to take it all in. In front of us, looming in the lengthening shadows of the setting sun, are the sound mirrors, crumbling stone memorials to a time when the world was at war.

Up until this point, memories of the film Eden Lake had plagued our thoughts and conversations as we drove through the Kentish beach resort of Camber Sands, on past the old arcades and the Pontins holiday resort. We’d joked about the possibility of our trip ending in some sort of stabbing spree, small talk whose real aim was to hide our actual nervousness about the evening ahead. But now, seeing the mirrors waiting for us on their man-made island, all joking ceases, all fears subside, and we are left with a profound sense of awe for the relics of mankind’s endeavours, and the vague sound of his dreams still echoing through the centuries.

Road trip

We left London that morning by car, stopping briefly in the Kentish town we grew up in to borrow a large Canadian canoe from a friend and then spending the better part of an hour struggling to strap it to the roof. Once we could smell sea air, we decided to stock up on supplies, stopping at a general store the likes of which you’d expect to find in the American Deep South: all wood-clad and covered with sawdust, its parish newsletter bearing an image of a demonic papier-mâché statue of Christ fashioned by children for the local church. The banjo theme from Deliverance was sounding in my head, and I think at one point I accidentally started to hum it as I stood at the counter. The old woman at the till seemed to not notice as she rang up our dinner of cheese sandwiches and bottles of ale.

"Built in the '20s and ’30s, the mirrors were developed to amplify the sound of approaching enemy aircraft""

We made a short, scenic excursion through the deadwood weirdness of the Dungeness Estate as we got close – its shell gardens, its painted shacks, the shimmering bulk of the neighbouring nuclear power station – before pointing the car towards our final destination. We parked at the end of a dark alley between garages and the caravan park that backs onto the gravel pit. Outside a spiked gate plastered with ‘Keep Out’ signs and barbed wire, we removed the canoe as quietly as possible to avoid rousing local suspicions, then dragged it a couple of hundred metres to the shoreline. There we sat – crouching in the rushes to avoid detection by a lone dog walker – waiting for the right moment to jump in the canoe and paddle into the open water.

Our desire to remain undiscovered was based on more than just a fear of happy-slapping local kids terrorising us in our tents in the night. In 2003, English Heritage decided to preserve the sound mirrors from graffiti and general vandalism by cutting off access to the island via a man-made moat. These days, the lonely island where they sit has become a difficult place to get to. Built in the 1920s and ’30s, the sound mirrors were developed by military engineers as an early warning system to amplify the sound of approaching enemy aircraft before they came into view. By the time war broke out again in 1939, the devices were all but redundant, overtaken by both an increase in aircraft speeds and, more importantly, the emergence of radar.

Once the coast was clear, we launched the canoe into the water and jumped in, trying to avoid soaking the tents, camera gear and other equipment that lay inside the canoe. We rowed towards the opposite shore and the concrete structures. Strange black shapes thrashed around in the shallows. Now and then, we hit the gravel bottom of the lake as we navigated through rushes, and we had to get out and guide the canoe along until we hit deeper waters again. Our screams almost gave us away as we discovered leeches stowing away on our legs and feet.

Seeing sound mirrors

Looking up at the surreal beauty of the sound mirrors, our original uneasiness is replaced by an overwhelming yet peaceful sensation; their unsettling mix of the ancient and the alien make us forget our exhaustion and our fears. Not even the small bursts of distant gunfire from the neighbouring MOD training site can detract from the eerie serenity of the monoliths, which take on a strange humanity in the gathering darkness, their great frames glowering on the horizon like the faces of Easter Island heads.

As night falls and even half-hour-long exposures fail to pick up any light, we decide to set up camp. We long ago agreed that the bug-infested shingle of the island was no place to pitch a tent, instead opting to climb up the base of the main sound mirror and sleep inside the bowl of its tilted 30ft satellite-like dish. Few experiences have lent a sense of

"They were huge beasts, the likes of which you’d only expect to find in the heart of the Amazon..."

communion with the universe like lying back and looking up to see the night sky pinned up with stars and framed beneath a stone arch, flooded with a sense of floating through the blackest fathoms of the cosmos in a fossilised alien ship. Only the distant glow and ceaseless buzz of the power station infringes on the solitude, lending a strange undertow to our dinner of sandwiches and brief rumination on the wonders of the universe over beers bought from the general store. The bottles empty, we bid goodnight and do our best to settle in on a bed of sloped concrete.

It’s then that the noise starts: frogs, or possibly toads, their croaking chorus pitching ever upwards in intensity as the night bottoms out before us. We’d seen them earlier trying to launch themselves at our canoe. They were huge beasts, the likes of which you’d only expect to find in the heart of the Amazon, but nothing could have prepared us for how many there might be, or what levels of acoustic assault they were capable of achieving. I am so glad to be off the ground but the noise is like no other I have heard. This is no gentle lulling of crickets and frogs on the bayou, but rather a raging torrent of sinister gurgling screams, like the collective anger of a million inconsolable babies all reaching fever pitch at the same time.

So long slow night

The night passes slowly. Every time the noise ebbs, I begin to drift into sleep, only for it to then start up again with renewed ferocity, louder and more aggressive than before. Finally dawn brings a salvation of sorts. I clamber down from the mirror to take more pictures, and as suddenly as they came, the cries cease.

The journey back to the car is as placid and beautiful as anything I can remember. As the sun rises and the weight of a sleep-deprived night is lifted by it, we paddle out onto a calm dawn lake that’s decorated with sleeping swans. Shimmering in the refracted glory of a pastel sunrise, the sound mirrors lend the air of old stone friends by the dawn’s light. We bid them farewell and point the canoe towards home. The sheets of film lay exposed and protected in my bag. We have made it safely through the night.