Book #37: Shadowlands by Matthew Green
Shadowlands: A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Cities and Vanished Villages by Matthew Green
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Many people probably do not know that Britain has a number of settlements that have vanished , and Dr. Matthew Green's book explores several of the reasons why this has happened.
For example, Skara Brae in the Orkneys was a settlement that sank under what effectively became a landfill site, and the village of Dunwich gradually fell off a cliff as a result of coastal erosion.
The book here is very detailed, and I was able to tell when reading this that Dr. Green had done a large amount of research, from a variety of sources. I noticed that, while he look a largely objective view, he occasionally became slightly opinionated, particularly with his view about how we should ensure that settlements stop disappearing; his conclusion mentions the devastating effects in some places of the Coronavirus pandemic, including public houses that never reopened. I noticed also that he is no fan of King Charles I, who he accused of "political and religious tyranny" at one point.
On the other hand, he takes an almost completely impartial view in one chapter to an incident where an entire village was lost to create a reservoir, setting out both points of view within what seems to have been a large moral dilemma, with the loss of homes weighed against the need to get water to the city of Liverpool. He mentions how one of the protestors suggested poisoning the reservoir water, until someone else responded that the locals "drink only beer".
Some of the best bits of the book, however, were the sections that described Dr. Green's own experience of visiting the sites where the villages used to be, and being able to witness them first hand, and he describes them in vivid detail.
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