3.5 out of 5 stars
Just north of where I live is not one but two deserted villages, Knowlton and on the opposite bank of the River Allen is Brockington. I have walked past them on a guided tour and looked at the bumps in the fields. There are various reasons why this might have happened, the Black Death being a popular one, but the exact reason may never be known.
Matthew Green first heard of Dunwich in 2016, a medieval city that had fallen into the sea because of coastal erosion. The last church in the city had dropped into the sea in 1922 and the mysticism of the place intrigued him. It would be the beginnings of a series of journeys that would take him from the wonderfully named Winchelsea to the bleak Scottish islands that are battered by the Atlantic, to the mountains of Wales where a village was deliberately drowned to provide an English city with water.
I thoughts parts of this were excellent, particularly the chapters on Skara Brae on Orkney and Stanford in Norfolk. These two chapters had Green visiting the sites and teasing out the stories from what he was observing. Other chapters were more of a potted history with a handful of paragraphs when he did actually rock up to the place. It can’t be easy to get the feel of a location that mostly is at the bottom of the sea or is a series of lumps and bumps in a field, but reading this I felt that he had researched these places mostly from a desk. It was not bad overall, but I thought it could have been much better.
I agree with you there, I also found that he tended towards picking out unpleasant and macabre stuff, dwelling on it rather. My review here https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2022/04/15/book-review-matthew-green-shadowlands/ Like you, I liked it best when he had a good poke around in the places.
I think that it needed a better editor. Islands of Abandonment is much much better than this