Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain
How will our lives be recorded by archaeologists of the future?
Matthew Green (Faber, £20)
THIS book brings the sobering realisation that a power cut brought on by Storm Eunice is really not the biggest of deals. On February 4, 1288, a tempest sluiced the East Sussex port town of Winchelsea right out into the sea; residents that had scrambled to higher ground returned to a scene of drowned people and livestock swirling in a filthy eddy. A vivid evocation of the speed with which the Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy was razed by the Plague is similarly frightening.
The story of Dunwich, a city that fell into the sea off the Suffolk coast in the 13th and 14th centuries—the last of its seven churches toppled in 1922, ripping open its graveyard and sending a jumble of human remains into the waves —was the spur for Matthew
Green’s travels. The historian was grappling with psychological trauma brought on by the political turmoil of 2016 and subsequent personal loss; he decided to explore more of Britain’s lost settlements—the ‘shadowlands’ —and discovered that such places can be soothing and put life in perspective. Staring into the grey waters at Dunwich—‘the sense of emptiness is haunting and overpowering’—he realised that ‘an absence can have more presence than what is present’.
Conversely, it was a storm, in 1850, that uncovered the longburied Neolithic settlement of
Skara Brae on Orkney; in 1928, Prof Vere Gordon Childe, an eccentric Australian who spoke 17 languages, did long division in Roman numerals and drank rum with milk, led a dig that uncovered eight identical houses; his theory, chiming with his communist beliefs, was that this had been a community of equality. For Dr Green, it represented a stability that was in contrast to his situation.
Archaeological theory can receive a cruel reception. The author meets Stuart Wilson, the young amateur archaeologist and toll-booth worker who faced trial by social media for buying a Monmouthshire field under which the medieval city of Trellech lay buried—‘there is nothing weird or obsessive about him … and I feel a little foolish for expecting there to have been’—and proffering the theory that Trellech, in its day, was as big as London.
Dr Green wears his own research lightly and writes eloquently. However, even the bouncing prose cannot help but convey unease; with coastal erosion as much a potential threat to infrastructure now as it was to the residents of Dunwich, how will our lives be recorded by archaeologists of the future?