Selling Dungeness by the pound

Kent Online reports:

For sale: a spacious seaside property. 

The Dungeness Estate - which has been described as the UK's only desert - is up for sale and yours for £1.5 million. 

Owen Leyshon, of the estate’s managers Romney Marsh Country Partnership, said: “This is the sale of an incredibly unique landscape and a very popular tourist destination. 

“We are expecting a massive scrum of people making offers.” 

The 468 acres of private land has been owned by the Paine family trust since 1964. 

But now it is in the open market in a unique sale is being handled by Strutt and Parker estate agents. 

The sale does not cover the Dungeness nuclear power site, the two lighthouses, the Pilot pub, Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway station. or the neighbouring RSPB reserve.

I was at Dungeness a couple weeks ago, when I took these photographs.

Let me also quote Malcolm Saville's description of Dungeness at its most run down after the war. It is taken from The Elusive Grasshopper (1951):

Some days later Jon tried to describe Dungeness to his mother and found it very difficult, although it was little more than a desert of shingle which had been made even uglier by slovenly and haphazard building of bungalows, shacks and old railway coaches. 

There were a few fishermen's sheds of tarred timber on the sea side of the road, besides the group of well-built cottages round the lighthouse and the square, white building which housed the great foghorn. 

Many of the little bungalows had been badly damaged by bombs and the blank eyes of their broken windows gave them a look of unheeded death. There is, perhaps, nothing more depressing than an untenanted house, but one that is empty, damaged and neglected as well is a horrid sight and even on this sunny afternoon Jon felt that this outpost was both curious and uncanny.