Shadowlands

Matthew Green F aber €25 ★★★★★

As climate change redraws coastlines, you wonder how recognisable future maps will be – after all, in the mesolithic period Britain and Ireland were connected to continental Europe by ‘a vast plain of lakes, marshes, forest and woodland’. Enter Matthew Green, author of Shadowlands, a poetic history of ‘ghost Britain’ – a subject as romantic as it is relevant. Green articulates both qualities in evocative prose that shifts between lyrical and drily humorous. His enthusiasm is infectious, which is just as well, for sometimes the detail feels exhaustive. Civilisation appears entrenched but the shadow topography – lost cities, abandoned islands, swallowed settlements – reveals its fragility.

The problem is urgent and widespread, he writes – 800 buildings in England and Wales could be under water in 20 years, and London by the close of this century. The Yorkshire village of Skipsea has northern Europe’s fastest eroding shoreline and Welsh Fairbourne, a ‘ghost-town-in-waiting’, is being slowly engulfed by waves.

Nonetheless, Shadowlands is a fascinating journey through place and time, ‘loss and absence’. As Green roams expansively from Orkney’s buried neolithic houses of Skara Brae (above) to Suffolk’s drowned medieval city of Dunwich, from the evacuated Hebridean island of Hirta to the flooded Welsh village of Capel Celyn, he explores the factors that led to their demise and traces the evolution of community and culture.

It’s said people love an underdog, and Shadowlands is a shrine to them, ‘the places that slipped through the fingers of history’. An answer to Cal Flyn’s bestselling Islands Of Abandonment, Green’s book offers ‘an awful premonition of what lies ahead’ and an elegiac resurrection of the past.