...you deserve it anyway...
Posted on 11/18/2010 4:40:57 PM PST by decimon
The ghosts of thousands of long-forgotten villages haunt Britain, inhabitations suddenly deserted and left to ruin. As a new campaign begins to shed further light on these forgotten histories, the Magazine asks - what happened and why?
Albert Nash, blacksmith for 44 years in the village of Imber, Wiltshire, was found by his wife Martha slumped over the anvil in his forge.
He was, in her words, crying like a baby.
It was the beginning of November 1943, a day or two after Mr Nash and the rest of the villagers had been told by the War Office they had 47 days to pack their bags and leave, to make way for US forces.
Within weeks Mr Nash had died. Folklore had it that the death certificate said the cause was a broken heart.
Imber, once a Saxon settlement, is one of thousands of British ex-villages - once thriving communities that succumbed to natural or human forces, like disease, coastal erosion, industrial decline, reservoirs or war.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Okay, so, WTH?!?
Hey, after this posting fiasco, I’m sorry for my ever having been born.
Yea, Barry should apologise to the French because they don’t speak German these days..........
Nope. I expect it to only accelerate as gasoline becomes more expensive. High energy prices means urban, high density housing.
"What has this to do with America? Well, King Arthur, son of Meurig, had brothers and sisters. His brothers were Idnerth, who was murdered, St Pawl, known as "King Poulentius" in the Lives of Saints, Ffrioc, who was killed by Morgan Mwynfawr, and Madoc Morfran, the Cormorant. If we begin to research the sixth Century Madoc Morfran some extraordinary and startling facts emerge. For instance, the best recorded and defining event of "Dark Age" Britain was the devastation caused by debris from a comet, which struck in 562. Dr Victor Clube, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford University, estimates this as having been an equivalent of a scatter of at least 100 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs. Unsurprisingly, great tracts of land were rendered uninhabitable and populations were wiped out, giving rise to subsequent literature relating to "The Great Wastelands" of Arthurian Britain, the "Yellow Plague" and the "Coming Of The Dragon". Seen in this context, all are symbolic of the same cataclysmic event… "
...you deserve it anyway...
I was in Western Kansas a couple of years ago. Since oil prices were up, my mom’s small town was beginning to recover a bit. The tiny school district was overwhelmed with, swoon, 35 more kids that had moved into the district that year.
I think it will stabilize at some point because there will always be some people who like their space, even if wages and opportunities are limited.
Went over my head, whatever it was.
You mean this:
"World War II has become the midpoint of all history; in the case of these abandoned villages, it had to do with the economics and gubmint budgets of the war effort basically pulling the plug on that slower-moving (and probably non-economic) ways of life. When Margaret Thatcher was PM, she pulled the plug on a good many subsidized activities, such as Welsh mining. One Welshman complained that his town was going to vanish, because once the Pit was gone, there was no reason for the town to exist."
"OTOH, there are plenty of placenames in the Domesday Book which still exist (probably the overwhelming majority, btw), including some pretty small places which were even smaller in the 11th century. A good number of British towns have been continuously occupied since their Roman foundations, while other Roman settlements were abandoned and forgotten, even in local folklore. And there are some British towns which have been continuously occupied since Pre-Roman times, whereas most (maybe all) of the hillfort towns reduced by Vespasian's artillery (in Roman times, that was catapaults and such) had been around for a long while before those events, but ceased to exist thereafter."
I’m sure that would be a real interesting story if I could make heads or tails of it. I’ll try again tomorrow when I should be more clear-headed.
The town where my family hung around for 900 years was founded in 669 and Listed in Doomsday.
Re: Ken Follett
I read and watched “Pillars of the Earth” and found it greatly steeped in history but bogged down with sex and predictable story lines. (I love history -hate love stories)
I considered reading “The Fall of Giants” but don’t want to get sucked in to another mediocre book of his unless this one is different.
What’s your opinion?
Nestling halfway between the mediaeval town of Shrewsbury and the birthplace of the industrial revolution at Ironbridge, lies Viroconium -- once the fourth largest city in Roman Britain. While its three greater fellows -- London, Cirencester and St. Albans -- have all undergone considerable further development in subsequent ages to yield an amalgam of historical overlays, Viroconium was simply abandoned sometime in the 5th or 6th Century.
...Whether Viroconium really was the Camelot of legend or whether some other local prince or king carved a domain for himself amid the remnants of the old capital of the civitas Cornoviorum* will perhaps never be known..
Whoever and whatever its most recent occupant may have been, the city is believed to have been finally vacated sometime between AD 500 -- AD 650.
"There is, I feel, a strong case for the contention that we do not inhabit a benign planet. This planet is bombarded relatively often. If this story is correct, we have been bombarded at least three times - and probably five times - since the birth of civilisation some 5,000 years ago. And each time, the world was changed." In their book "The Origin Of Comets", Bailey, Clube, and Napier write : "the destruction and chaos accompanying the fate of the Roman empire [midway through the First Millennium] was all but total, the almost complete breakdown of the old order leading to a loss of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of antiquity which was far from temporary."
Been there. I love ancient Roman ruins in England. Plan on returning next year for a visit. Spent 3 years there during my USAF career. Best years of my USAF career.
There is sex, human condition and all...but very steeped in history. It follows the early 1900’s through about 1923 and is very educational regarding the lead up to WWI and beyond. The trilogy runs through 1989 following the lives of 5 families (English, Russian, German, American and Welsh.) You will meet David Lloyd George, PM Askwith (sp), Churchill, Trotsky, Lenin, Wilson and more in the first book. According to an interview of Follett I heard, he expects to have the next book ready in 2012 and the final in 2014. He then plans a third book in the “Pillars of the Earth” and “World Without End” series.
They finally wised up and kicked ya out, eh? ;’) When I was a kid we were on vacation, and we turned onto a major two-lane called (my surname) road. My dad quipped, “it’s probably the road he left on” in reference to the guy after whom the road had been named.
Thanks FN, I hope it works like the award did for the Tin Man.
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