These are Winchelsea’s ghost streets. The sight of the seven-hundred-year-old New Gate marooned at the southern end of the old town makes the soul quiver; there it stands forlorn, a stranded portal to a lost world. [p. 110]
In the years after the Brexit referendum and Trump's ascent, Green's life was changed by personal losses. He became 'determined to discover how [the] country had been shaped by absences', and set out to explore eight 'lost' settlements in Great Britain, from the Neolithic settlement Skara Brae, abandoned around 2500BC, to Capel Celyn, levelled and flooded to create a reservoir in 1965. Shadowlands is his account of visits to Dunwich, Old Winchelsea, Saint Kilda and the deserted medieval village of Wharram Percy, and the factors contributing to each place's demise -- weather, plague, politics and piracy, war gaming, the post-war economic boom -- as well as the human responses. Some fled their homes, fearing the wrath of God; some went up against faceless bureaucracies; some hung on til the grim end. Some never left at all.
Green explains that 'this book is written in the minor key': it's about waste as much as destruction, 'squandered potential', not only economic and physical ruin but the heartfelt loss of hearth and home. I learnt quite a bit, especially about the rise and fall of Winchelsea, attacked seven times by the French and the Castilians between 1360 and 1389, and breeding a fair few pirates itself. Some of the vignettes, lives brought into sharp focus in a few lines of prose, were decidedly melancholy, and others gloriously defiant.
Shadowlands could have done with an eagle-eyed editor: as Green sometimes contradicts himself or misremembers facts (on page 53 he writes of medieval Wales as 'a patchwork of princedoms – twenty-two at their peak' and further down the same page 'the various warring princedoms of Wales – eighteen at their peak'); elsewhere he writes of salt as one of the items the inhabitants of St Kilda couldn't readily produce -- whyever not? They lived on an island surrounded by salt water. But this was, despite occasional glitches, an immensely absorbing and engaging book. Green's good at balancing his own emotional reactions, and his modern perspective, against his sense of a place and his research into its history. I especially liked his phrase 'the presence of absence', the sense of emptiness we feel in a place that has been populous but now is not. The Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Ruin', which Green quotes in his Introduction, evokes that magnificently:
Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls,
high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude,
many a meadhall full of festivity,
until Fate the mighty changed that.
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