Snuggled between Greatstone Dunes and RSPB Dungeness, Romney Sands offers you the chance to…
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Dungeness NNR on the southeast Kent coast is one of the best examples of a shingle beach in the world, an apparently hostile landscape but possessing a rich and diverse wildlife. The reserve has many distinctive plants which favour this harsh coastal pebble habitat. Low-growing blackthorn and yellow-flowered broom hug the shingle, and in the clean air, can be draped in lichens. Dungeness is rich in insects, notably in its moths. It is the only place in Britain where the Sussex emerald, a green moth that appears in July, is found. Another rarity is the pygmy footman moth, which lives on lichen. The common tern is a summer visitor that breeds on the islands in the large gravel pits on the reserve and feeds offshore for fish. The ponds are also home to great crested newt and medicinal leech. Dungeness is also one of the best places in Britain to see the smew, a striking white winter migrant duck. The wheatear is one of the earliest migrants returning from Africa, seen from March to October.
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Discover Kent
The White Cliffs of Dover are an English icon – the epitome of our island heritage and sense of nationhood. They also mark the point where the Kent Downs AONB, that great arc of chalk downland stretching from the Surrey Hills and sometimes known as ‘the Garden of England’, finally reaches the sea. This is a well-ordered and settled landscape, where chalk and greensand escarpments look down into the wooded Weald to the south.
Many historic parklands, including Knole Park and Sir Winston Churchill’s red-brick former home at Chartwell, are also worth visiting. Attractive settlements such as Charing, site of Archbishop Cranmer’s Tudor palace, and Chilham, with its magnificent half-timbered buildings and 17th-century castle built on a Norman site, can be found on the Pilgrim’s Way, the traditional route for Canterbury-bound pilgrims in the Middle Ages.
In the nature reserves, such as the traditionally coppiced woodlands of Denge Wood and Earley Wood, and the ancient fine chalk woodland of Yockletts Bank high on the North Downs near Ashford, it is still possible to experience the atmosphere of wilderness that must have been felt by the earliest travellers along this ancient ridgeway.
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