World history is full of stories of loss and longing for home. One has only to think of all that has preceded the Arab Spring or the devastating destruction of towns, villages and smallholdings in Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia, where countless numbers of families were driven by war and sectarian hatred, from the homes their families had lived in for generations. The threat to the security of ordinary family life continues. In Britain today, thousands of the poorest families, especially in London, will have to leave their homes because of the new Housing Benefit cap. As a letter in the Guardian from Dave Morris (Feb 20th 2012) points out: ‘Unless resisted, this institutional social engineering will cause the largest forced displacement of working-class people from their homes since the enclosure acts of the eighteenth century.’ Deserted Villages and the Dispossessed Cicely Herbert reflects on villages that have disappeared and the inhabitants who lost their homes.
The river is within us, the sea is all about us The sea is the land’s edge also, the granite Into which it reaches. the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation.
These words must have a special resonance for any island dwelling peoples. At the time the Doomsday Book was compiled, Dunwich, in Suffolk, had a population of 3,000, and could boast three churches.
Violent storms swept away many medieval buildings and today only the remains of a priory can be found and the last of its gravestones fell in to the sea in the 1990s.
The ‘drowned village’ is a more recent phenomenon, brought about by the world population explosion and the human’s insatiable need for a constant supply of water, necessitating the creation of mega man-made reservoirs, which inevitably swallow up large tracts of land and enforce the displacement of the local population. In Graun, on the Italian/Austrian border, two natural lakes were united to create such a reservoir, which left the church belltower protruding from the waters, and gave rise to many a local legend and ghost story. In the 1970s much of the parish of Normanton in the English Midlands was cleared and flooded to create the large reservoir, necessary for the provision of water for the growing population. I have yet to visit it, but I understand that the deconsecrated church, which stands at the water’s edge, has been half filled with rubble and now serves as a museum charting, among other things, the history of Rutland Water.
The exact location for Oliver Goldsmith’s best known poem, ‘The Deserted Village’ is uncertain, but it is likely that a rich landowner wished to expand his estate and create one of the magnificent gardens, complete with mock ruins, ornamental lakes and parklands so beloved of the wealthy eighteenth century gentry. Goldsmith, a man who much preferred the pleasures of the city taverns to the rural realities of poverty and hard work, nevertheless manages to capture something of the desolation and destruction of a once vibrant society, as the villagers, soon to be exiled ‘hung about their bowers’ took a long farewell, vainly wishing for ‘seats like these beyond the western main.’ One imagines that some of these villagers may have been the forefathers of citizens of the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and other far-flung places, as were the Scottish victims of the ‘Highland Clearances.’ As a child I spent every summer holiday staying in an old holiday lodge in the western Scottish Highlands.
As soon as I was old enough to explore the upper reaches of the glen alone, I discovered the burned out ruins of several crofts, which puzzled me greatly. I returned there whenever I could, aware of a deep sense of sadness that pervaded the glen, which, at the time, suited my mood admirably. I learned, much later, how the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries had driven the indigenous peasant population from their lands, when their English landlords, greedy and uncaring, burned down the crofts to clear the way for the more profitable enterprise of sheep farming.