Stevie‘s review of Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain by Matthew Green
British and Irish Historical Non-fiction published by W. W. Norton & Company 19 Jul 22
I have a fascination with abandoned and ruined places, particularly those that once housed large numbers of people – either domestically or for employment – which may well be a result of growing up close to Ladybower Reservoir and its twin drowned villages of Derwent and Ashopton. So this book very much appealed to me, with its stories of how different British villages, towns, and even cities, developed, thrived, and then ceased to exist. The author has visited each of the places he writes about, and this allows the reader to follow in his footsteps, even to those places not usually accessible to the general public.
The book also documents what happened to each settlement after it was abandoned, and, in the case of those that were lost, how each was rediscovered, along with any controversy surrounding the archaeology or post-desertion treatment of the buildings and their surrounding environment. Each chapter covers with a single place, with the chapters arranged roughly chronologically according to the dates of abandonment, and themed around the reasons for, and causes of, abandonment and destruction.
I’d vaguely heard of Skara Brae, the oldest and one of the most mysterious of the abandoned places, but found myself unexpectedly fascinated by the story of its discovery, the various excavations and the ongoing research into what happened to its final inhabitants. By total contrast, the much larger, but almost as undocumented in the contemporary historical records, city of Trellech struck me as having a much sadder story in the present than in its putative past, with doubts being cast over the importance and veracity of the discoveries and the care with which the excavations had been performed.
Moving forward again, the other settlements all had a greater degree of familiarity to them, either because I’d visited the areas in which they are located or because I have researched villages in other parts of the country that have met, or come close to meeting, similar fates. I think my favourite, if death, doom and destruction can result in favouritism, was Wharram Percy – possibly because the village was abandoned due to a medieval pandemic, and then visited by the author during our most recent pandemic.
I enjoyed all the little details of everyday life in each place, which highlighted both how similar the inhabitants are to us and how very different they were at the same time. My one reservation about the book was that some chapters felt to contain a little too much padding, and I’d have maybe preferred another couple of chapters in the same number of pages. I still bought a copy for my Mum as a birthday present, though.
Grade: B
Summary:
Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff. This is the extraordinary tale of Britain’s eerie and remarkable ghost towns and villages; shadowlands that once hummed with life. Peering through the cracks of history, we find Dunwich, a medieval city plunged off a cliff by sea storms; the abandoned village of Wharram Percy, wiped out by the Black Death; the lost city of Trellech unearthed by moles in 2002; and a Norfolk village zombified by the military and turned into a Nazi, Soviet, and Afghan village for training.
Matthew Green, a British historian and broadcaster, tells the astonishing tales of the rise and demise of these places, animating the people who lived, worked, dreamed, and died there. Traveling across Britain to explore their haunting and often-beautiful remains, Green transports the reader to these lost towns and cities as they teeter on the brink of oblivion, vividly capturing the sounds of the sea clawing away row upon row of houses, the taste of medieval wine, or the sights of puffin hunting on the tallest cliffs in the country. We experience them in their prime, look on at their destruction, and revisit their lingering remains as they are mourned by evictees and reimagined by artists, writers, and mavericks.
A stunning and original excavation of Britain’s untold history, Shadowlands gives us a truer sense of the progress and ravages of time, in a moment when many of our own settlements are threatened as never before.
Watch the trailer.
