Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 286

Readers of this book will look in vain for references to the long-lost settlements identified and described some fifty years ago by Maurice Beresford and others since it deals only with those communities which met their end during the twentieth century. The author, who claims his production to be ‘an exercise in social history’, offers a series of pen portraits of deserted villages from St Kilda to North Wales, from Lancashire to Cornwall, from Pembrokeshire to Dorset and from Montgomeryshire to Devon. People are driven from their homes by geological accident, industrial decline due to exhaustion of mineral reserves, flooding for reservoirs, demand for land in the interests of national defence and, in the case of several remote Scottish communities, what seems to have been sheer exhaustion.

Skipping along like a fly over summer water, Buckton leads us from places like Clicket in Exmoor, (whose name, he chastely reminds us, ‘refers to the copulation of foxes’) through Imber in Wiltshire, requisitioned by the military in 1943, via the Tryweryn valley in Montgomeryshire, (stolen from the people to provide water for Liverpool in the 1950s), to the tiny island of Mingulay in the Outer Hebrides which was finally abandoned in 1912, eighteen years before the grimly austere folk of St. Kilda turned their backs on their bleak and treeless homes. In telling the tale of each community, Buckton relies substantially on oral reminiscence and residually on websites and a few ‘popular’ local books and pamphlets. He manages, for example, to relate the rather tragic tale of Tyneham on the Isle of Purbeck without a single reference to Patrick Wright’s celebrated The village that died for England. This apart, there is nothing inherently wrong with Buckton’s approach, although to call it ‘social history’ is a step too far. While recording the recollections of residents of these places may be a valuable exercise in itself, ‘social history’ demands some sort of analysis, some attempt to get to the bottom of what is really meant by the ‘close bonds’, village ‘spirit’ and ‘sense of community’ and kindred phrases which crop up throughout the text. Why, when faced with the loss of their homes, did some communities meekly accept their lot while others showed some spine and raged against the dying of the light? If life in Marwellham in the Tamar valley was ‘more about survival than enjoyment’, folk were probably only too glad to leave when the minerals ran out in the early twentieth century; likewise the wretched miners at Dylife in the wastes of upland Montgomeryshire, most of whom ‘died tragically young’ from the effects of lead poisoning. Elsewhere in Wales, nationalist sentiment strengthened the backbone of the people to contest the seizure of land for military purposes by insensitive and unsympathetic authorities, and to react with no little violence against the flooding of the Tryweryn valley. The profound depth of feeling over this issue gave added stimulus to the nationalist movement of the fifties whose efforts were partially instrumental in moulding today’s Wales.

Somehow, though, the English seemed to have shrugged their shoulders and accepted their fate, in much the same way as they unquestionably swallow the alarming lunacy regularly spewed out from Brussels today. Moorswater in Cornwall, Buckton tells us, has been wrecked by the dual cancers of industrial parks and motor cars. Why has this been allowed to happen in the name of ‘progress’? Why do we stand back and allow our towns to be homogenized and surrounded with warehouses in primary colours stuffed with goods which none of us really need? Surely the time has come for the English people to stop this madness and concurrently to call a halt to the squandering of our land, the one real resource available to us.

If Henry Buckton’s book causes readers to reflect upon these issues, he can probably be forgiven his liberties with Welsh orthography while the proofreaders of I.B.Tauris can be excused the seemingly slapdash approach to their craft that is exemplified in the production of this book.