Shadowlands

Drowned. Buried by sand. Decimated by plague. Plunged off a cliff. Matthew Green, a charismatic British historian and broadcaster, tells the extraordinary tales of the rise and demise of a dozen of Britain's most remarkable ghost towns and villages, and explores their eerie and often-beautiful remains.

Starting with the prehistoric settlement of Skara Brae on Orkney, submerged in sand for more than 5,000 years, Green visits and excavates Britain's shadowlands in vivid detail: the lost capital of medieval Wales dug up by moles in 2005; an abandoned Black Death hamlet; a medieval city swept off a shingle island in a tempest; a Norfolk village zombified by the military and turned into a Nazi, Soviet, and Afghan village for training. Shadowlands peers through the cracks of British history to give us a truer sense of the progress and ravages of time, in a moment when many of our own settlements are imperiled by climate change.