Feast your senses with an ambitious new arts festival which brings music, drama and stunning photography to a forgotten corner of Kent for the next 10 days.

A jam-packed new cultural festival will shine a vibrant light on the Romney Marsh.

JAM on the Marsh will pour out musical, dramatic and visual arts at venues across the area between Friday, July 11 and Sunday, July 20.

Highlights will include an evening with celebrated composer Paul Mealor and a haunting and atmospheric performance of Rachmaninoff’s Vespers by Selwyn College Cambridge.

Not-to-be-missed dramatic storytelling with music is provided in the concert Fossils,

Monsters and Ghostly Tales, which tells the story of Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.

Among the visual high points is a free-to-enter photography exhibition by an award-winning international photojournalist, whose work for JAM on the Marsh focuses on the bleakly mysterious yet beautiful Romney Marsh landscape.

“Hundreds of years ago all of this area was under water. All of the area is reclaimed,” says Justin Sutcliffe, explaining his exhibition title This Was Once Sea.

“The more time I spent there, the more I found myself drawn to how empty large parts of it are, criss-crossed by waterways, railways, roads, power station lines and this idea of all these lines taking a journey somewhere.”

For Justin, who lives in Whitstable, the artistic photography display is very different to his usual work specialising in breaking news, world events and international war zones.

He said: “This is an attempt to find something with a level of conceptual content. It’s been really fascinating learning about the marshes. It’s an under-explored region of Kent which has a stark beauty to it.

“I used to go occasionally as a child and teenager and then I lived abroad for many years, so I’ve rediscovered this area. It doesn’t have the seaside town feel of Margate but it does have something of holidays-from-another-era about it. It has a very special atmosphere.”

Justin, whose work has appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times and the Independent on Sunday, set out to search for ‘the epic and intimate’, to both capture the broad scale of the marshes and yet to concentrate each image on one particular aspect of them.

The result is a visual insight into the atmosphere of the Romney Marshes but not as you’d see it in a tourist brochure.

“The pictures are more thought-provoking,” said Justin, as is the way in which they are displayed. A selection of images from This Was Once Sea will be displayed within carriages of the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway (RHDR) for festival-goers to appreciate as they travel between the different venues.

Images within the exhibition will also be formally displayed at RHDR stations at Hythe, New Romney and Dungeness, and at the RSPB Reserve at Dungeness.

WHERE TO JAM

Selwyn College choir perform Rachmaninoff’s Vespers at St Augustine, Brookland, this Friday, July 11, at 7pm. Tickets cost £10.

Fossils, Monsters and Ghostly Tales will be performed at the Marsh Academy, New Romney on Wednesday, July 16, at 6pm. Tickets cost £3.

An evening with Paul Mealor – the Welsh composer who shot to fame after Prince William commissioned a piece by him for his wedding – takes place at the Romney Academy Theatre on Thursday, July 17, at 7pm. Tickets cost £12.

To buy tickets and for the full programme of JAM on the Marsh events, visit www.jamconcert.org/concerts