Just Finished Reading: Shadowlands – A Journey Through Lost Britain by Matthew Green (FP: 2022) [300pp] 

Have you ever looked over an old map and seen places, villages, towns or even cities that you don’t recognise, that you haven’t even heard of before? You wonder exactly what that means. Was the early cartographer mistaken, relying on poor information or maybe making things up, like “here be dragons”? Or maybe they changed their names over time for some reason. Because places don’t just disappear into thin air, right? Well, apparently, they do – kind of. 

It’s easy to look at a modern map and imagine that places have ‘always’ been there. Many towns and cities across the world are at the very least centuries old and some go back millennia. But as places are founded and become settled, other places fail or fall into disuse for a whole host of reasons. These are the places, across Britain, that the author seeks out in this intriguing and well written narrative. Running from ancient times to the present and from the furthest north to the south coast, the author explores the remains of a city abandoned in the early Middle Ages due to shifting power structures, a port city engulfed by the sea, a village abandoned after the Great Plague, a city that literally fell off a cliff, an abandoned island too remote to sustain itself, towns bought up by the Ministry of Defence (or the War Office at the time) and used for live fire Army exercises and a village inundated by a controversial reservoir scheme. 

Although they were all interesting in their own way, I particularly found the Army ranges and the submerged Welsh village of particular interest. The Ministry of Defence owns great swathes of land across Britain and uses some of them – as in the examples within these pages – to recreate parts of Europe (prior to D-Day), parts of Eastern Europe (during the Cold War) and parts of the Middle East (to train for deployment in Afghanistan and Iraq). It must be MOST bizarre to drive around a corner in the English countryside (as the author found out) and be presented with a highly accurate facsimile of downtown Fallujah. The last example in the book of the Welsh village was honestly heart-breaking. A small farming community being essentially removed – with little real opportunity to resist – in order to supply Liverpool with water for its industries and growing population by the building of a dam and the flooding of their valley. 

Overall, this was a fascinating and often very human story of change, decline and abandonment. It shows clearly that things – cities! - thought of as permanent are nothing of the kind. Things change, populations move, decline, cliffs collapse, estuaries change direction or block up with silt, environments become unliveable. Eventually towns fade, from maps and from memories. They enter the shadowlands. Definitely a look at an overlooked part of British history. Definitely recommended.