Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain

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Matthew Green's book's a wonderful blend of social and cultural history that draws on a variety of sources from local records and interviews to art, myth and literature, but also looks forward to consider the future and what losses might be yet to come. These two chapters had Green visiting the sites and teasing out the stories from what he was observing. The end result is a curious and haunting yet strangely uplifting alternative history of the British Isles. These sites tell stories of climate change; monumental shifts in ways of living; of war and conquest; devastating plague; and rumours of hellfire.

Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain eBook : Green Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain eBook : Green

Shadowlands sets out to show, in Matthew’s words, how our country’s history is “shaped by absences”.In it, Matthew visits eight villages, settlements and towns stretching from the neolithic period to the twentieth century that fell victim to one form of obliteration or another. Enter Matthew Green, author of London: A Travel Guide Through Time and a new book, Shadowlands, a poetic history of ‘ghost Britain’ – a subject as romantic as it is relevant. He is the author of London: A Travel Guide Through Time and Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain. Thoroughly fascinating, this book looks at how both natural and man-made causes have been responsible for vanished cities and villages in Britain. Unfortunately the writing is very overdone, and for me it landed as a bit pretentious and not very readable.

Shadowlands by Matthew Green – Review - On: Yorkshire Magazine Shadowlands by Matthew Green – Review - On: Yorkshire Magazine

This neolithic Pompeii is “one of the oldest built structures anywhere on the planet”, more ancient than Stonehenge or the pyramids of Egypt.Other chapters were more of a potted history with a handful of paragraphs when he did actually rock up to the place.