Towns that time forgot
Shadowlands Matthew Green
For my summer holiday this year I’m sorely tempted to go on a road trip around Britain’s “ghost towns” – places that the inhabitants, for whatever reason, long ago abandoned.
This is not just me being anti-social – there is something mysteriously moving about such places. Take Dunwich, a clifftop settlement on the Suffolk coast. One of Britain’s biggest cities 1,000 years ago, its population dwindled to nothing over the centuries as it became clear that large chunks of it were destined to plunge into the North Sea.
“There is presence in what is missing, there is history in there being so little,” observed author Henry James in 1905, as he surveyed the few remaining ruins.
Historian Matthew Green has written a fascinating guide to those British towns and villages that lost their inhabitants – because of wars, plague, environmental factors or changes in farming habits. He has travelled all over the country in search of these ghost towns. In Monmouthshire, he meets a man who has ploughed his life savings into searching for the remains of Trellech – said to be Wales’ largest city in the 13th century but later destroyed by power struggles.
Green also tells the fascinating story of the inhospitable Scottish island of St Kilda where a small population survived precariously for centuries before giving up and relocating to the mainland in the 1930s.
And he visits places that 20th-century governments forced residents to abandon: Capel Celyn in Gwynedd, flooded to create a reservoir in 1965; a cluster of Norfolk villages used as a military training base since the Second World War, full of houses that no one has set foot inside for decades.
This is an outstanding book, bursting with fascinating information. It’s unobtrusively poignant and gently philosophical, with thoughtful insights into the ways in which some places are still part of the warp and weft of Britain even though no one lives in them.
And the book is timely. With many parts of the country threatened by climate change, we may soon be forced again to think about abandoning some of our towns and villages.