I've been wanting to go to Dungeness for a long time. I finally made it yesterday.

 It is the bleakest headland I've ever been on; and in some ways the most sinister, with a quietly throbbing nuclear power plant brooding like some petrified giant of the forest dominating the background and which is never quite out of eyeshot. Wherever you are so is it. 

But it has beauty; this long, deep pebble beach has a spare, haunting quality, which for me, was utterly intoxicating; the sky was pure aquamarine, startlingly blue; everywhere there's spiky yellow gorse, tied down with long anchoring roots to stop it being torn out like twisters do trees in Kansas from the harrying sea winds that probe into every nook and cranny of this massive shingle beach. The vegetation is low, thick, matted, like a tough, hard wearing carpet.

At times it felt as if, and looked as if, we were by the cote d'azur; the sun was high and the pools that fill the old workings were deep and clear, like ice green emeralds. And at the same time, it also felt like the last of England: where the survivors of some apocalyptic event (the Anglo version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, perhaps) had fled to, with the power station being the only reminder of a now extinct civilisation.

It's certainly the place where people must be living off the grid. Like the driftwood that reaches the long pebble beach, so it is for those souls who wish to disconnect and lead another existence. They land there.

The perpetual flush of the sea, pushing the pebbles along the shore to it's own symphony of sound must be manna for those who want nothing but to hear the roar, crash and hubbub of nature. And you hear that in the birds that adore Dungeness: gulls roost on the lip edges of building in the power complex and cut dramatic outsize shadows against the building walls as they wheel and turn in the afternoon sun. Spring's first sand martins and the odd pioneer swallow cut arabesques through the sky. Full bodied ravens strut like country squires. Warblers yell like market stall holders or explode like car alarms from every bush.

A little way off the beach is the warm water outfall from the power plant; just like a dishwasher churning or the mythical maelstrom, it's frothing kettle of spume and water, which the gulls and dive bombing terns love, feasting on the fish attracted in their turn by the warm water.

The notion came to me as we wandered over the headland, first by the long pebble ridge, then across each of the nature reserves on this magical land that Dungeness is really the world's largest Japanese rock garden. It has the harmony and the serenity of a zen garden. Untouched. Natural. Forever. Yet, and this is the ever present irony of nature, what the waves bring, they can take away. The crumbling coasts of eastern England testifies to that. And, of course, there is the squat, humming presence of Dungeness A and Dungeness B as man's tacit contribution to instability.

Yet, I could live there. That frontier like quality so appeals to me. Few places have invited me to contemplation in the UK; this is one of that tiny group. I can fully understand why Derek Jarman headed south and set up a homestead. His "Prospect Cottage" is a tiny gem in black shingle. Fronted by a garden which reflects the austerity of the area - driftwood, flotsam, hardy plants, pebble cairns, minature standing stones - again, in a dreamy, zen fashion which fits so aptly the sensibility of this modern day Prospero's island. And the piece de resistance: the first verse of John Donne's "The Sunne Rising" marked out in raised lettering on the cottage's black tarred western wall.

I've thought for some years now that to leave garden behind is a gesture of the greatest generosity. A present for the generations yet to be born. Designed and created by people who may well, and I think particularly of Prospect Cottage and Chiswick House gardens here, never see it in it's realised state of exultant beauty. What existed on paper for them exists in front of our eyes. What a great legacy.