Shadowlands
A Journey through Britain's Lost Cities and Vanished Villages
by Matthew Green
2022
In Shadowlands, author Matthew Green takes us to 8 sites around Great Britain where people used to live and now do not. These aren't small places that got absorbed by a bigger neighbor. A couple were replaced by public works, a couple were subsumed by the sea. The others were abandoned due to economic and social changes more so than to politics or climactic disasters.
The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of abandonment. The oldest site was an island village whose inhabitants left around the end of the Stone Age; the newest was a Welsh town that was evacuated and flooded in the 1960s to create a reservoir. Green tells us the history of each place - what it was like before, how its abandonment went, in a few cases how it was later rediscovered. He visits each site in person to tell us what they're like today. Perhaps because his head is so full of their history he tends to perceive them as haunted, unquiet places despite their stillness and solitude, the vivid past overlaid atop the muted present.
The quality of Green's writing makes this book especially interesting to read. His physical descriptions of place are evocative, with details that make it relatively easy to imagine what each place might've looked like in its heyday, and what it's like to visit now. His historical reconstruction is empathetic, but doesn't shy away from unflattering details. He lists all the ways the Marcher Lords, empowered by the English king to war with and conquer the Welsh, would've used the iron produced in Trellech, an ore mining and blacksmithing boomtown, the grievous injuries inflicted by weapons and implements of torture. He tells us of the piracy practiced by the port town Winchelsea, the ships burned and sailors drowned, and the toll of a famous, terrible naval battle fought off its coast. He tells us the toll of the Black Death in Wharram Percy, and the bloody bird hunts on St Kilda island, where sea birds and their eggs were the main source of food.
Some of the sites enjoyed a second life after an earlier disaster. Old Winchelsea relocated to the mainland as its island flooded. For a time, it was a major hub for wine merchants, until it was sacked as revenge for decades of piracy, with civilians killed inside the church where they sought sanctuary, and its harbor filled with silt, becoming too shallow for large ships to dock. Wharram Percy was devastated by plague, but it disappeared, alongside many medieval villages, because of economic changes. With fewer serfs available for farming, and peasants able to choose where to work and demand higher wages, swaths of farmland (along with the farming villages) were converted to pasture for grazing sheep.
Green also shows us the role that the loss (or rediscovery) of of inhabited places has had on British culture at various times. The city of Dunwich, built on a coastal cliff, progressively fell into the ocean over several hundred years as the shoreline kep moving inland, and its increasing ruin help inspire the first antiquarians to care about preserving Britain's historic sites, and served as a muse for generations of romantics and poets who wanted to contemplate their mortality. Philosophers traveled to St Kilda island during the Enlightenment because they thought its inhabitants existed in a 'natural state' and could resolve the ongoing dispute about whether humans are innately good or wicked. Later, Victorian tourists came en masse to gawk at the lives of 'primitives' living as the imagined their own ancestors might've. When we think about the past, we often use those thoughts to provide motivations or justifications for our actions in the present.
Shadowlands reminded me a bit of Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment. Both Flyn and Green visited places people no longer lived, though for different reasons, and they saw different things. Flyn's sites were mostly abandoned since World War II, often because industry or warfare made them uninhabitable, and she focused on the reintroduction of nature to those sites. The places Green visited are mostly older, and many are places people could still live, they just don't (and of those now unlivable, three are underwater). He's motivated by fears for the future, inspired by the covid pandemic and rising sea levels due to climate change, but at each site his focus remains on the past. I probably find these sorts of tours of lost places inherently fascinating, but I appreciate when they're thoughtful and written well.
In Shadowlands, author Matthew Green takes us to 8 sites around Great Britain where people used to live and now do not. These aren't small places that got absorbed by a bigger neighbor. A couple were replaced by public works, a couple were subsumed by the sea. The others were abandoned due to economic and social changes more so than to politics or climactic disasters.
The chapters are arranged chronologically by the date of abandonment. The oldest site was an island village whose inhabitants left around the end of the Stone Age; the newest was a Welsh town that was evacuated and flooded in the 1960s to create a reservoir. Green tells us the history of each place - what it was like before, how its abandonment went, in a few cases how it was later rediscovered. He visits each site in person to tell us what they're like today. Perhaps because his head is so full of their history he tends to perceive them as haunted, unquiet places despite their stillness and solitude, the vivid past overlaid atop the muted present.
The quality of Green's writing makes this book especially interesting to read. His physical descriptions of place are evocative, with details that make it relatively easy to imagine what each place might've looked like in its heyday, and what it's like to visit now. His historical reconstruction is empathetic, but doesn't shy away from unflattering details. He lists all the ways the Marcher Lords, empowered by the English king to war with and conquer the Welsh, would've used the iron produced in Trellech, an ore mining and blacksmithing boomtown, the grievous injuries inflicted by weapons and implements of torture. He tells us of the piracy practiced by the port town Winchelsea, the ships burned and sailors drowned, and the toll of a famous, terrible naval battle fought off its coast. He tells us the toll of the Black Death in Wharram Percy, and the bloody bird hunts on St Kilda island, where sea birds and their eggs were the main source of food.
Some of the sites enjoyed a second life after an earlier disaster. Old Winchelsea relocated to the mainland as its island flooded. For a time, it was a major hub for wine merchants, until it was sacked as revenge for decades of piracy, with civilians killed inside the church where they sought sanctuary, and its harbor filled with silt, becoming too shallow for large ships to dock. Wharram Percy was devastated by plague, but it disappeared, alongside many medieval villages, because of economic changes. With fewer serfs available for farming, and peasants able to choose where to work and demand higher wages, swaths of farmland (along with the farming villages) were converted to pasture for grazing sheep.
Green also shows us the role that the loss (or rediscovery) of of inhabited places has had on British culture at various times. The city of Dunwich, built on a coastal cliff, progressively fell into the ocean over several hundred years as the shoreline kep moving inland, and its increasing ruin help inspire the first antiquarians to care about preserving Britain's historic sites, and served as a muse for generations of romantics and poets who wanted to contemplate their mortality. Philosophers traveled to St Kilda island during the Enlightenment because they thought its inhabitants existed in a 'natural state' and could resolve the ongoing dispute about whether humans are innately good or wicked. Later, Victorian tourists came en masse to gawk at the lives of 'primitives' living as the imagined their own ancestors might've. When we think about the past, we often use those thoughts to provide motivations or justifications for our actions in the present.
Shadowlands reminded me a bit of Cal Flyn's Islands of Abandonment. Both Flyn and Green visited places people no longer lived, though for different reasons, and they saw different things. Flyn's sites were mostly abandoned since World War II, often because industry or warfare made them uninhabitable, and she focused on the reintroduction of nature to those sites. The places Green visited are mostly older, and many are places people could still live, they just don't (and of those now unlivable, three are underwater). He's motivated by fears for the future, inspired by the covid pandemic and rising sea levels due to climate change, but at each site his focus remains on the past. I probably find these sorts of tours of lost places inherently fascinating, but I appreciate when they're thoughtful and written well.
Sounds interesting
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