It is this tantalizing sense of the almost-at-hand that informs the historian Matthew Green’s fascinating new tour of Britain’s lost towns and villages ... amounts to a sobering reminder of earthly transience ... Green recounts all this at a measured, engaging clip, although he is not above straining for effect ... At times, Green pays insufficient attention to the surface of his prose ... If the project is to resurrect Britain’s lost places, then lapses like these can only send them back to the bottom of the reservoir. For the most part, however, Shadowlands is a well-researched, highly readable history whose deepest import may be premonitory. The re- emergence of Aceredo was caused by a historic drought attributed to climate change; climatologists expect rainfall in Portugal to drop by up to forty per cent by 2100 ... By helping us to identify with their lost inhabitants, what the stories of Skara Brae and Dunwich evoke most powerfully is not the past but our probable future, when our cities have been abandoned or swept out to sea.
[Green] disinters their rich history and reimagines the lives of those who walked their streets, revealing 'tales of human perseverance, obsession, resistance and reconciliation'. By doing so, he makes tangible the tragedy of their loss and the threat we all face from the climate crisis on these storm-tossed islands ... As Green’s book so eloquently shows, people are drawn to these places because they are poignant reminders of the transitory nature of our own much-loved homes and communities.
By drawing on the slow erosion of places as remote as Orkney’s beehive-like community at Skara Brae, created before both Stonehenge and the Pyramids, Green uses the engulfing past to warn of future upheaval ... Green’s outstanding achievement in Shadowlands is an extraordinary chapter about land that has been far more recently lost — to requisition ... Often playful in tone, Shadowlands nonetheless has a serious purpose. In reminding us of the loss of once-thriving communities such as Dunwich and Winchelsea, Green also offers an urgent reminder of what may lie ahead as a result of climate change and rising sea levels.
... not just a travelogue of scenic obsolescence. En route, the book offers us a gripping overview of humankind’s seemingly unstoppable evolution from primitive but harmless nomad to the rapacious bureaucrat in charge of civic planning in your neighborhood today ... Mr. Green’s visit prompts an engrossing meditation on the British cultural tradition of ruin worship ... For Mr. Green, at least, ruins are not necessarily picturesque. Grass, sand and water haven’t been the only threat to humanity’s dreams of permanence: Shadowlands reminds us that war is one catastrophe we inflict upon ourselves ... Even if you do not share the author’s pessimism, the plangent stories of the lost places described in his book will make you aware of civilization as a precarious and hard-won achievement. These sites may not hold any answers about the future, but, as Matthew Green so movingly shows, 'they can at least provide us with perspectives on how we might contend with our fragile future.'
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 ... 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.
The account of the ruins’ archaeological uncovering in the 20th century is diverting enough, but details of the lost village and its culture are too sketchy to be truly moving; perhaps inevitably the most interesting chapters focus on later eras, where the most information and certainty are to be found ... Green’s sites are sometimes well known. The story of St Kilda, the remote Scottish island finally evacuated by its cliff-scrambling, fulmar-eating inhabitants in 1930, has been extensively covered. But he takes a wider view, offering thought-provoking historical context, notably a discussion of the fetishisation of the 'noble savage' and the islanders’ knowing exploitation of their prelapsarian public image as they learnt to play-act naivety for tourists ... At points, the academic voice overpowers the narrative, but before the general reader is overcome, Green’s passion and historical vision bursts from the page, summoning up the past in surround sound and sensual prose.
Green’s haunting travelogue through Britain’s disappeared places is both an examination of the historical forces that led to their abandonment and a meditation on the presence of absence in physical and emotional landscapes ... In each case, Green evokes the deep loss felt by the displaced as livelihoods, traditions, and cultures disappeared along with the communities that supported them ... Through these slices of British history, Green has woven a moving exploration of impermanence, memory, and the hypnotic allure of the past.
