Six of our favourite shops in Rye

Just returned back home from a glorious 2 weeks at Beach Haven. Blessed by good weather we managed several days on the beach, returning back to the house for barbeques under a setting sun. The kids ran around the garden and shook off most of the sand on the trampoline straight after food!

Catching up with our good friends from Rye we learn that the town may have reached it’s tipping point. There are so many new shop openings that Rye is positively buzzing. We spent a couple of blissful days wandering the streets.

You must sample coffee and delicious gluten free cakes at the Truffle Cup. If you’re lucky you’ll catch our friend Gina on the Gaggia. She’s the discerning eye behind ‘Folk at Home’. We walked away having purchased several felted soaps and a ‘summer’ poster. I’m buying the chopping board next if she has any left. Her blog ‘folkathome@gmail.com’ is a lovely insight into a very creative mind always on the lookout for understated gorgeous products.

McCully and  Crane has quirky unusual antiques that we love. www.mccullycrane.com

We had a relaxed, delicious lunch at Apothecary where the children sat reading Asterix comic books which meant we could catch up on the newspapers. www.apothecaryrye.co.uk/

My wallet is going to suffer at Bird which stocks super chic clothes (not that I am but will die trying) that would be perfectly at home in edgy Shoreditch. www.boutiquebird.co.uk

A few trips to the very friendly butchers J Wickens, in Winchelsea, were necessary to stock up with meat for the BBQ. On a sunny evening there really is no better way to end the day than  a game of rounders in the garden whilst the burgers sizzle.

Derek Jarman

From Beach Haven turn left out of Links Way, head towards Lydd, then Dungeness and in 10 minutes (driving) you’ll find yourself in a place that is as bleak as it is beautiful. The eerie charm of the area hits you as soon as your eyes focus on the abandoned rusty bits of machinery dotted about on the shingle alongside collapsed fishermen’s sheds and boats parked on the beach. The distant hum of the nuclear power station adds to the strangeness.

About a minute after, on the right, you’ll find a neat little black clapperboard house with yellow windows. Prospect Cottage and its unique garden has been photographed so many times it is quite famous.  Primarily this is because it was the home of late film maker Derek Jarman. 

Whilst on a trip to taste ‘the best fish and chips in England’ at the Pilot in 1986, Jarman and Tilda Swinton spotted the cottage for sale for £750. He bought it and started to turn the shingle surrounding his home into a sculptural magpies nest. Every day Jarman would prowl the beach gathering rusty detritus that for him had a beauty of it’s own, or redundant utilitarian objects like tools and rubber gloves. A unique visually inspiring environment came into being where nature and the man made combined. 

However it is the planting that is his real achievement here. During summer months it I hard to imagine how he managed to grow such vibrant, colourful plants in Britain’s only official desert. Dungeness is actually home to 600 different plant species though you won’t find many of them in a garden centre. These are the outsiders of the plant world; sea kale, gorse, burnet roses and Blackthorn. Unlike nearby Romney, Dungeness residents are only permitted to grow indigenous plants and you’re not permitted to pick anything either.

To highlight the importance of Derek Jarman, Film London launched the Jarman Award four years ago for “artists working with the moving image and whose work resists conventional definition, encompassing innovation and excellence” . The winner will be announced in October.

http://filmlondon.org.uk/news/2011/may/the_jarman_award_2011_launches_1

http://www.dungeness-nnr.co.uk/

http://www.thepilot.uk.com/

Some lovely things about Camber beach

On a beautiful day whilst sitting on Camber beach it’s hard to think of a better place to be. It’s not surprising that the location is often used by advertising pretending to be the Hamptons, Long Island or even further afield.

Camber is right on the eastern edge of East Sussex but is the only sand dune system in the county and is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) under the name ‘Dungeness, Romney and Rye Bay’. In the winter, 17 different species of bird make their home here. http://www.sssi.naturalengland.org.uk/Special/sssi/index.cfm

This is a good local website if you love nature and want to know what’s going on.

http://www.wildrye.info

In the winter we deliver our Christmas trees to the beach car park so that they can be buried in the dunes. The trees are ‘planted’ on their sides in shallow trenches where gaps (caused by trampling from visitors) have been created in the dunes. The trees help trap wind-blown sand, allowing vegetation to grow and stabilise the sand. The great news is that the dunes are gradually getting bigger. This is particularly good news for Camber village which lies below the high tide level and would quickly be flooded.

Walking over the dunes from Beach Haven, using path no 6, you will catch sight on the right (though it’s currently sinking into the sand) of a second world war concrete pillbox (bunker). Which ties in nicely as I wanted to mention that Camber beach was used in the 1958 film Dunkirk starring John Mills to recreate Operation Dynamo. It was used again as the Normandy beaches during D-Day in the 1962 epic The Longest Day.

Oh and Carry On Follow That Camel was shot on location on the beach during the early months of 1967 when Camber Sands doubled as the Sahara Desert although filming had to be stopped several times because the dunes were covered in snow! Heard the one about the camel that wouldn’t walk on sand...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa9mRhqQSvo