Shadowlands takes the reader on an amazing journey, bringing to life places that were once inhabited but are now lost forever. Matthew Green travels from North West Scotland down to the Channel coast and looks in quite remarkable detail at a number of places. I’ve seen a tv programme about ongoing work at the Skara Brae settlement and found this account provides even more detailed insight into life there. I also recall the sadness and loss of an entire community in Wales when an area was flooded to make a reservoir to provide Liverpool with water. The resentment and anger remains to this day.

This book has a lyrical quality; it’s so well written and every story is different. Accounts such as this really bring history to life and I’ve really enjoyed meandering through places long gone. A fascinaand compelling slice of social history.

My thanks to the publisher for a review copy via Netgalley.

This was an inspiring journey of forgotten towns and villages in Britain. Looking at eight lost places, it told the almost forgotten stories in a way the brought them back to life. The author supplied plenty of historical facts and details in the book. It is a treasure and captures me in a way the most non-fiction fail to do.

Under Britain's streets, fields and lakes lies another landscape of forgotten villages and towns; places that for natural, economic or military reasons have been abandoned and left to decay. Maybe too many of the populace died of plague for the village to be viable, maybe the sea came crashing through doors too often, maybe authority in the form of city corporations in need of water or the Ministry of Defence needing training grounds decided their need was greater than that of the inhabitants, but all over the country remains can be found of places that for one reason or another people left; sometimes voluntarily, sometimes being evicted.

In Shadowlands, Matthew Green takes us on a tour of eight of these places from Skara Brae on Orkney, hidden for thousands of years under sand dunes, to Winchelsea on the English Channel, where not one, but two, towns have fallen foul of coastal conditions - the first washed away by violent storms, the second decaying slowly as its harbour silted and traders left.

On the way, he takes the reader to Wharram Percy, left a ghost town after the Black Death and a subsequent change in farming practices,

Trellech on the Welsh Marches near Chepstow - once a bustling place feeding the English settlers need for iron armaments and accoutrements of war

Dunwich where a Medieval city on the Suffolk cliffs has gradually crumbled into the sea.

St Kilda which had to be abandoned by its inhabitants when its population dropped to unsustainable levels as young people sought a life beyond their inhospitable, isolated island home.

The lost villages of Norfolk taken over during WW2 for military training, and never given back.

And, the most poignant perhaps because it's still remembered by people who grew up there, the valley of Capel Celyn in North Wales, lost to Liverpool's growing need for water.

Part history book, part travelogue, this is both an engaging and informative read, bringing these locations back to life, and placing their growth and decline within a wider context of social change around them. Green also digresses into how previous visitors/generations have responded to these places - from touristy explorers of the Enlightenment looking for noble savages on the islands of St Kilda, to the romantic poets mourning the passing of Dunwich or Winchelsea.


I've always had a curiosity about the past, and forgotten places such as this have a mysterious pull about them - trying to imagine the lives of the people who lived and worked there, their sadness (or perhaps delight) at leaving - more so than the ruins you might find lurking under a shopping mall, so this books was definitely MY kind of thing, and I'd greatly recommend it to anyone with even a mild curiosity about the past.

Taking a journey from the Neolithic Skara Brae in Orkney to the flooded valley of Capel Celyn in Wales, via the lost city of Trellech in the Welsh Marches and the drowned city of Dunwich and town of Winchelsea, Green does a good job of surveying the existing sources, both contemporary or near-contemporary to the place in question’s decline and then more modern, then visiting the place, or as near as he can get.

Green uses the different towns, arranged in date order, to look at shifts in society, such as the move to villages in the first place, the first and later enclosures, the population drop that came with the Black Death (though not so many actual villages and towns were lost as a direct result of this depopulation as we might think), changes in life opportunities that made traditional lifestyles drop out of favour and climate issues that have happened through history, other warmings and then coolings. He does then mention climate change at the end and considers what might happen to low-lying parts of Britain.

My full review (Friday 15 April) https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2022/04/15/book-review-matthew-green-shadowlands/

This is a fascinating look at the villages we have lost in Britain, over the centuries. It’s a sad thought - a village being flooded for the need of a reservoir where it stood. All that goes to make up village life - homes, chapels and their acre of God’s space, just buried beneath an ocean of water. Others may have been lost due to natural disasters, some because of WWII. All of these examples stirred feelings of sorrow and loss in me, despite some being lost years or even centuries ago.
Despite the sadness of our lost spaces, this is a book very well worth reading. Very informative and enlightening.

Matthew Green is a magnificent storyteller. He writes with curiosity, compassion, and, cleverness.

Green’s exploration of how fragile even the largest of our cities can be to either environmental change or human frailty is engrossing. Settlements die when humans leave them, and whether this is due to flooding or war, they leave their mark on the land and in the memories of those that once lived there.

Green’s tales evoke feelings of melancholy, rage, and helplessness. For me, this was especially true in the chapters about Dunwich and Capel Celyn (both of which were drowned). He has a great knack for putting into historical perspective the lives of the people that lived in these doomed places; explaining how these settlements played a role in a grander geopolitical context or even in the evolution of human societies.

This is a fascinating look at periods of British history that is engrossing and beautifully written. Like many of the best non-fiction books, it ignited my imagination and not only stimulated my intellectual interest but also captivated me emotionally.

Very highly recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Matthew Green, Shadowlands A Journey Through Lost Britain, Faber and Faber Ltd 2022.

Thank you, NetGalley, for providing me with this uncorrected proof in exchange for an honest review.

Shadowlands is a beautiful blend of poignancy, social commentary, journeys in landscapes that tell a range of stories of secrecy, joy and sorrow, and a history that has been brought out of hiding. I loved the writing, the topic and the stories, the way in which social history has been written to provide proposals for the future that, while gently stated, are nonetheless an important admonishment about past practices and plans for protecting the environment, people’s wellbeing and communities.

The villages Green studies and writes about have disappeared for a variety of reasons, and Shadowlands covers a fascinating range, from environmental disasters, where a village slides into the sea; to flooding a thriving village to provide for a dam; the village requisitioned by the army, its population moved, and the village destroyed to provide an imitation village for army exercises; to the village left behind on St Kilda Island when the last of its population is evacuated.

To this Australian, the last example resonates. Some of the villagers emigrated to Australia, landing on a beach in Victoria, now named St Kilda after the island they left behind. Green introduces the villagers and the different iterations of their life on the island in an engrossing story of village life and theoretical debate. Initially a community with limited links to the mainland through trade, the advent of visitors becomes an important part of community life through the development of tourism. The islanders become a source of the idea that ‘natural man’ is without blemish, that is, they are used as a political tool. This idea languishes in the face of reality, and introduction of a different set of political ideas. Over time, the island cannot provide for the population, it decreases, and the last of the villagers are taken to the mainland. The island is left to the puffins and other sea birds, and on a less appealing note, the bones of the dogs whose work ended with the disappearance of the village.

In contrast with the gradual decrease in viable living on St Kilda, the village of Winchelsea slips into the sea. This is an example through which concern for the environment can be made. Stark examples of loss of community are requisitions of villages. Here, the social consequences of such activity raise questions. Another interesting debate about professional archaeologists and their relations with populist archaeological endeavours occurs over the two different areas in which a village is presumed to have been located.

These are only a few of the enticing examples around which Green weaves the most compelling of stories. Green’s ability to weave historical content into engrossing narratives, to raise political and social concerns and to leave them open for further thought is splendid. Shadowlands is at once a progression through history and an encouragement to develop less destructive policies, or at least improved communication and compensation to communities whose villagers disappear. This was a wonderful read, and I shall continue think about the ideas and history it revealed.

This book’s laudable aim is to question what we think we know about British history, by delving into places that were once hugely significant but that no longer exist. There’s such a huge current appetite for ‘lost’ everything in this country - London rivers, landscapes (Doggerland et al), rewilding, urban exploration - and it’s not hard to understand why, given climate change, Brexit, war, plagues, a sense of a world out of control, and loss of connection with what little nature is left, and historical fabric disappearing as well. On a small island built on layers upon layers of visible history, it’s interesting to add these ghost places into the mix, and to realise how shifting and unstable these geo-social foundations are, that British history and topography isn’t a straightforward linear narrative at all, but disrupted throughout the centuries by - guess what, climate change (coastal erosion especially), plagues (the Black Death et al), war, international bonds forged and broken. Plus ca change and all that. So it’s a perfect moment to publish a book like this, and the author rightly talks often about climate change past and present, along with other man-made and natural catastrophes that have shaped the natural and human landscape of Britain. This book should have been right up my street given the social/landscape history subject matter.

But it wasn’t.

The style was my main gripe. It’s over-wordy, repetitive and hyperbolic; purple prose abounds. Editors, please do better.

The content also irked me. While full of fascinating facts (and a lot of pointless statistics) there is a vast amount of supposition. OK, we’re talking about places about whose history we can’t be certain, I admit, but the flights of authorial imagination were trite and grating.

My final irk is the gendered narrative. It’s a very male viewpoint with a focus on battles, politics and derring-do, rather than ordinary life. So women are largely absent. Not good enough.

There’s also far too much ‘horrid history’ for my liking - needlessly gruesome details of warfare, natural disasters and massacring animals, which all felt a bit pornographic.

Did I learn a lot? Yes.

Did I enjoy? On the whole, no.

Has it got great reviews and I’m in a minority here? Yes.

This was a very interesting and well researched book. It was very engaging and sometimes poignant to read about how some of these towns were lost.
Some of the locations I had heard of but others were unknown to me. I really enjoyed reading this book.
Thank you to Netgalley and the Publisher for my ARC.

This book is for all the history lovers. It is a really fascinating read into some of Britain's history and long lost places. I liked using my imagination to envisage what some of the places might have looked like and wished they were still around today to visit. A well written and researched book.

An excellently written, thoroughly researched and moving history of a number of Britain's lost places. Green writes with empathy and sympathy and seems knowledgeable about the locations he covers in the book, which range from places abandoned or destroyed hundreds or more of years ago to much more recent stories, all of which are sad and affecting.

However, although this is a very well-written book, for me it was just a little bit too long - I enjoyed it but as I was ploughing through the later chapters, I found myself waiting for the book to end. Nevertheless, I think this is a wonderful book and well worth a full five stars.

Very detailed accounts about lost settlements, from islands to whole towns. Some I already knew about, others were completely new to me. Well written, if a little too verbose occasionally. An interesting book.

Shadowlands is a fascinating, well-researched book about some of the lost settlements of Britain: abandoned due to the plague, flooded beneath a reservoir or fallen off a cliff. Each tale was interestingly told and some were completely new to me. Some of the places vanished due to natural causes, other due to the actions of people and it was the latter that I found most affecting, particularly the story the Welsh village of Tryweryn sacrificed to provide water for Liverpool.

A recommended read, for those who love history and a bit of memento mori.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

This is the forgotten history of Britain's lost cities, ghost towns and vanished villages: our shadowlands. Utterly unique, exquisitely crafted and quietly powerful.

A very informative read! I was lucky enough to be on Orkney when I started the book so I had the pleasure of reading the chapter on Skara Brae just after I'd visited the site, but I found Shadowlands equally interesting when it came to places I'd never heard of. Highly recommended to anyone who is interested in British history.

Occasionally, a book comes along that makes me feel that I am on the same wave length as the author, this is one such book. I loved the idea of taking a selection of places that are now lost, for various reasons and telling their story. The idea of an intangible mystery is deeply intriguing to me. This isn't a text book as the author is much more of a social historian. We learn not just about the actual structures that existed but the people who inhabited them and their rise and demise. Much of it is based on referenced evidence but there is also a degree of romanticism in imagining past lives. If you have the same yearning to discover more about our lost history and what hidden worlds could potentially lie beneath our feet, curl up with this book and escape to the past. I received this advance digital copy curtesy of the publisher and Netgalley but I will certainly be buying a hard copy to share with others.

The synopsis looked fascinating & it turned out to be an engaging & informative read - for the most part. The author has completed lots of research & visits to the sites of some of Britain's lost towns & cities. From Old Winchelsea on the coast washed away by successive sea flooding, to the places commandeered for training purposes by the army amidst WWII, & an island community in the Outer Hebrides (St Kilda) which was eventually cleared of the few remaining residents in the early twentieth-century.

As mentioned above, it is written in an engaging style, & I feel I learned quite a lot. My one criticism is the repeated (but usually brief) mentioning of animals (mainly rabbits, dogs, & birds) being killed, sometimes purposefully to stop them killing other livestock, but at other times just because they were an inconvenience to 'progress'. It unfortunately happens, but I'd rather not read about it as I find it very upsetting. For that reason, I had to take a star off as it rather marred my enjoyment of certain chapters.

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Faber & Faber, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

I gave this book a 4 star rating. It’s a a nice, easy read that takes you on a journey of Lost Britain. The places chosen are interesting, and I admit it taught me quite a bit as there are a few places mentioned I’ve never heard of in here.

The title is very evocative of the content, therefore nothing that I could write would add much to that. Matthew Green looks into the disappearance of a few British cities and villages due to various reasons from climate chance, coastal erosion, economic booms/depressions, military repossession, pandemics. Every case is very compelling, as his research is very in depth, presenting the reader with every single facet concerning the subject. From the geography of every place/village/city, to its history and economic development, to what it's left of it at the present to his personal impressions. Every chapter fascinated me and was a great source of information. Needless to say I would really love to follow his footsteps and visit the remains of some this places.

Matthew Green has selected eight lost places across the British Isles, from the ancient Skara Brae to Cael Celyn, deliberately flooded in 1961. Along the way, he gives us a social history of these islands (and sometimes beyond). I think he has achieved a good balance of focusing on the lost places themselves and providing enough background history for context. The detours off the main track are welcome, be it musings on wine or an account of the purchase of land for excavation not development at Trellech in Wales. It’s poetic in places, too; I liked the image of ravens flying over plague-raddled country. This is non-fiction as engaging as a novel; Green is a great story-teller.