h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I can't remeber the name of this village I'll look it up.
The village was abandonded during the black death, and I believe there are a few other such villages in the uk.
Only the outline of the village remains now with sheep grazing over the visible outlines of the village buildings!

Z.

Cool! I wish I'd had more examples of non-North American ghost towns when I wrote the article that were beyond basic knowledge of Roman ruins and bombed-out towns from World War Two.

Is it Pickworth, Leicester? All that remains is the church entrance arch and some bits of stone and foundations.

Germany is also rich in ghost towns from the black death time. There are at least two of them close to where I come from, but these days you can't see anything left over. It's only the word that gets transferred from generation to generation.

...ghost thread, too.

The official name for these is DMV's (Depopulated Medieval Villages) and Warwickshire has *loads* of them. So many in fact that it has the most per square hectare on mainland britain.

The only place that has more is the Isle of Wight.

Thanx Abi!

Nice to know how ghostly this county is, must get my ghost busting kit!
Z.

Looks like someone raised this thread from the dead!

Dunno about the thread, but someone has raised this researcher from the dead!

Z

Its a pleasure - they were one of my special subjects at uni.

what, raising researchers...?

wow- something interesting about Warwickshire.
How does one spot these villages?

not so far from here there is a single random chimney in a field, surrounded by nothing, but I doubt there was a whole village there.

A plane or helicopter is about the only way to get an idea of what the village would have looked like. Nothing usually remains of the buildings as these would have been scavenged for building material. But the traces of them, while not visible from the ground, can be seen from the air. You also have to hope that there hasn't been any deep ploughing which would remove most of the archaeological evidence.

Don't forget about the ghost village's cousin, the drowned town...

Drowned town?

Yes, we have many of those in the American West: towns that were in the path of a future dam site and are now under the waters of a reservoir. Or perhaps towns caught on the wrong side of a changing shoreline along the coast.

I know of two DMVs that are worth a visit. One in Exmoor is the location that inspired Loorna Doone, as being the villiage of the exiled Scottish Clan: This is all fictional, but it's a lovely area.

Coates by Stow in Lindsey has been partially repopulated, but was notably empty at the time of the reformation, which means that the tiny church is a fascination glimpse of the Church in England before the reformation.

Thirdly, the flooded village of Ladybower appears (or rather, doesn't) in the film "Dambusters" where that lake is filmed in place of German locations. In drought times the steeple of church has been known to re-emerge.