Shadowlands: A Journey through Lost Britain

Matthew Green

Faber & Faber

Review by Fiona Rintoul

IF the purpose of structure is “to provide a sense of permanence in a natural world that never stands still”, as Matthew Green posits in Shadowlands: a Journey through Lost Britain, then the purpose of ruins might be to remind us of the essential futility of that ambition. Ruins, writes Green in this gripping travelogue cum history of Britain’s disappeared places, “are at once of their time, yet derailments of it, too, bringing the singularity – and fragility – of the present into stark focus”.

Nowhere exemplifies the illusion of permanence and the hopelessness of fighting back against the relentless march of time (and tide) better than Dunwich, the Suffolk city that fell off a cliff.

Dunwich, which was once Suffolk’s main port with a fleet of its own on the North Sea, became a ruin “incrementally” from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, with the last of its 18 churches crashing into the sea “amid a waterfall of dead men’s bones” in 1922. Knowing this, we read with the headshaking smugness of those afforded hindsight by long remove of bequests made to shore up another church that teetered on the cliff edge 400 years earlier or to erect a statue in a place of worship that “would barely exist at all” by the time of the bequeather’s death.

Dunwich teaches us another important lesson about vanished and ruined places. They can be both fascinating and beguiling, but only if we are at a temporal or emotional distance from the destructive forces that brought them into being.

The American-born author Henry James was one of a “flock of writers, artists and poets” who travelled to Dunwich to wallow in its “power of sadness”. “It was a dreamy, gentle place to live or visit, its violent destruction kept at a safe remove,” writes Green. “They did not have to contend with entire neighbourhoods crashing into the sea, along with parish churches.”

This need for distance helps explain why the two shadowlands in Green’s book that are located in Scotland – Skara Brae and St Kilda – evoke quite different emotions. The oldest of the abandoned places that Green explores, Skara Brae is at a comfortable remove of millennia from us. We can view its turfed remains, which conceal “the swaddling cloth of muck” that its Neolithic inhabitants smeared around their homes and the warren of passageways that connected them, with disinterested inquiry, just as we might potter around the ruins of Pompei largely untroubled by weeping for the fate of the long-gone settlement’s residents.

St Kilda is a different matter. The evacuation of this Atlantic isle 40 miles west of North Uist on 29 August 1930 is only just outside living memory, the last St Kildan having died in 2016. There are photographs of the St Kildans, or Hirtans, as the Gaelic-speaking islanders might better be called, gathered in the bay in their finery. Their lives, though unlike ours, are sufficiently recognisable for it to be almost impossible to read Green’s account of their departure from a vertiginous lump of rock that had been inhabited for 1000 years – before which they drowned their beloved dogs in the sea – without empathy.

“HMS Harebell loomed on the horizon like a ghost rig. The corpses of some of the islanders’ dogs were bobbing in the water, pecked at and nibbled by the gulls. The islanders were stolid, reconciled to an uncertain future, standing in the freezing air, waiting.”

Closer still in time is the drowning in 1964 of the village of Capel Celyn in Wales to create a reservoir for the city of Liverpool. Village resident Eurgain Prysor Jones was nine when this bastion of Welsh language, culture and tradition was “turned into a frightening alien domain with lorries and machines incessantly digging up the earth and throwing up enormous clouds of dust” as the groundwork for the annihilating reservoir was laid. Who can read of the filling of that hated artificial lake, when the roar of millions of gallons of water drowned out “the rousing tones of ‘Land of My Fathers’ in a monstrous, obliterative gush”, without a stirring of the soul?

Capel Celyn is not the only settlement in Shadowlands to have been erased by politicians rather than the forces of nature. The cluster of villages in the Stanford Training Area in Norfolk disappeared into a fenced-off military zone in 1942, and the evictees were never allowed to return to their homes. The deserted mediaeval village of Wharram Percy lost much of its population during the Black Death when “many thought they were soaking up the last glimmers of the universe’s existence”, but that was not what finished the village off. In 1458, the landowner began to evict the remaining residents to make way for sheep, creating in Wharram Percy “a perfect microcosm of what happening nationwide”, as a kind of English Clearances took hold.

Green is an historian, and Shadowlands is both meticulously researched and vividly imagined. The author has a novelist’s gift for bringing the past alive. When the king visits Winchelsea, the Sussex port that was moved at the end of the 13th century as the sea encroached, the reader is there among the “tumblers, jugglers and minstrels”, eyeballing the “apple-sized meatballs imprisoned in great mounds of jelly”.

Just occasionally, Shadowlands slips into sounding a bit like a geography textbook, but overall, it is a thought-provoking and satisfying exploration of vanished places and the enduring forces that put them to the sword: war, pestilence and climate change. As the Russian army lays waste to Ukraine, making the fragility of the present horribly manifest, it feels strangely prescient.

“At St Kilda, I saw a vision of the sort of brutally self-sufficient society to which humanity might regress in the wake of environmental collapse, a third world war or some other, unforeseen catastrophe,” writes Green at the end of his splendid book. With small towns being erased in Ukraine even as I write, that apocalyptic vision begins to feel less like poetic conjecture and more like a real possibility.