Shadowlands - Matthew Green

 Shadowlands is about vanished settlements where an echo of what once was still lingers.   They are all British (albeit some people struggle to believe that Skara Brae and St Kilda really are part of the UK) and Matthew Green has chosen to sort them chronologically, which I admit caused my interest to falter a little towards the end, as I prefer deep history to things I can just about remember.

Green therefore starts with Skara Brae, the semi-subterranean housing cluster in the Orkneys which is over 3000 years old.   I learned much here - and I already knew quite a bit.  Among the things I didn't know before was that the igloo-shaped, stone-built dwellings were insulated over centuries in their own midden or waste, and it was only when the whole cluster was covered over that the subterranean tunnels went in.   Next up was Trellech and Winchelsea, both developed by the greatest English king, Edward I.   Trellech was for a time the biggest city in Wales.   Now it is barely a hamlet.   It was built up as a powerbase by the Marcher lords of the Clare family, and when the last of them died, Trellech went into decline.   Winchelsea, of course, remains - but this is New Winchelsea, moved from the silting-up Old Winchelsea mainly because King Edward made it his first choice port for visiting his other domain in France.   I found both of these stories fascinating and both were equally new to me.   Wharram Percy was Trellech in a minor key, another settlement that crumbled when its dominant family moved away, and Dunwich a much better known (and more recent) variant of Winchelsea.  Dunwich literally fell into the sea through coastal erosion, a process forever underway and nowadays facing dozens of other easy coast settlements.

Green then moves on to the twentieth century.  St Kilda, frankly, I couldn't engage with.  I suppose it echoes in a way the story of Skara Brae, but I cannot mourn its loss; it seems to me a community that evolved to a certain fairly basic level and then stopped as the world moved on.  Next is one of those rural communities that were taken over by the military for training during the War and never returned to their original inhabitants.   I had not heard of the Stanford Training Area in Norfolk, which is still being used for simulated battlefields today.   I suppose that sort of thing has to be done somewhere and it seems to have developed something of a local employment base for people playing the enemy.   The final essay is Capel Celyn, a flooded village and valley in Wales.  Now, in the middle of a heatwave with privatised water supplies failing everywhere, is not the time to read it.   Yes, the locals put up a brave fight to save their homes.  Yes, modern Britain needs to harvest its water.   I don't remember the battle for Capel Celyn but I do remember, a few years after, the polite fuss when Rutland Water, which supplies my water, was created.   Villages were submerged, highly fertile farms drowned.   Somewhere in the middle of it is a steepled church, something for all the leisure sailors who use it now to be wary of.   And hey, when preparing the ground for flooding we discovered several prehistoric sea monsters!

I liked Matthew Green's style.   Yes, I would have edited here and there or at least questioned the need fr some bits.   But Green's passion for his subject always shines through.   His research is meticulous, his judgements balanced.   His ability to conjure up a place that, by definition, no longer exists is a gift to be cherished.   I'll be fascinated to see what he writes next.