| Author | Message | ||
     Simon Bestwick (Simon_b) Username: Simon_b Registered: 10-2008 Posted From: 86.24.209.217 |
...aka 'The Village That Died For England.' This video's pretty haunting. Great music too... ('Von' by Sigur Ros.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caBOepufF-8 | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.178.86.142 |
Spellbinding stuff. | ||
| Simon Bestwick (Simon_b) Username: Simon_b Registered: 10-2008 Posted From: 86.24.209.217 |
Cheers Mick! | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.22.229.8 |
Incredible that it should have been evacuated and used by the army as a shooting range. Outrageous. | ||
| Simon Bestwick (Simon_b) Username: Simon_b Registered: 10-2008 Posted From: 86.24.209.217 |
Sadly not unique, Hubert. Imber in Wiltshire and Mynydd Epynt in Powys suffered similar fates. There's a good website here: http://www.abandonedcommunities.co.uk/ Pretty fascinating. On Mynydd Epynt, I always find this passage poignant: 'Some of the residents attempted to maintain contact with Epynt, perhaps hoping that the war might end soon and it might be possible to return. Thomas Morgan from Glandwr used to slip back to his farm and light the fire to keep the house aired. One day he arrived to find his home in ruins. An army captain told him it had been blown up and he was not expected to come back again.' Bastards. | ||
| Degsy (Degsy) Username: Degsy Registered: 08-2010 Posted From: 86.134.93.9 |
When I lived in Durham I often used to visit the ruins of Houghall Colliery Village on the outskirts of the city. The pit closed in Victorian times but the final houses were only demolished in the 1950's. The sight of old doorsteps and bits of kitchen lino poking out from amongst the tree roots was weirdly unsettling, as if it was some relic from a thousand years ago. | ||
| Hubert (Hubert) Username: Hubert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 78.21.234.108 |
But whence the need to obliterate these tiny communities when (presumably) there was so much open space elsewhere? England is not as densely populated as, say, tiny Belgium. It reminds me of a similar evacuation in New England (Boston, wasn't it?) when the need for a water reservoir arose. | ||
| Ian Alexander Martin (Iam) Username: Iam Registered: 10-2009 Posted From: 64.180.64.74 |
The purpose was to use a tiny hamlet in order to simulate door-to-door techniques which would be encountered in France, Italy, Holland, and the afore-mentioned Belgium. |