The ghostly ruins of vanished Britain

Take a walk in the English countryside and you get the impression that little has changed. The churches and farmhouses, the hedgerows and footpaths – much of this has been preserved for centuries. However, as Matthew Green argues in Shadowlands, there is also a history of lost towns and abandoned villages hidden beneath the tranquil surface. His book tells the stories of eight such places, as well as the disasters that led to their disappearance, offering a phantom history of Britain through vanished settlements and forgotten occupants.

Shadowlands begins with the Neolithic village of Skara Brae in Orkney that was buried in sand several thousand years ago. It ends with the rural community of Capel Celyn, who lived in a remote valley in north-west Wales until their homes were submerged in 1956 to provide a reservoir for the people of Liverpool. In between, Green discusses river ports becoming silted over and coastal towns sinking into the sea, as well as villages emptied by plague or relocated by war.

He does an excellent job of placing these locations in a broader context, incorporating geography, economics and urban planning. We learn how the medieval arms industry powered the rise and fall of various Welsh border towns, and how the profits from the wine trade with Gascony were behind the wealth of the Cinque Ports. At the same time, he brings this material to life with tales of pirates and poets, soldiers and kings, as well as testimonies from the helpless inhabitants of vanishing homes.

The book also debates the meaning of ruins and the preservation of the past. Lost places can house any number of human longings, because once perished they become sites of creative possibility.