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Shadowlands

A Journey Through Lost Britain

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Shadowlands

By: Matthew Green
Narrated by: Matthew Green
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About this listen

Britain's landscape is scarred with haunting and romantic remains; these shadowlands that were once filled with life are now just spectral echoes. Peering through the cracks of history, we find Dunwich, a medieval city plunged off a Suffolk cliff by sea storms; the lost city of Trellech unearthed by moles in the Welsh Marches; and the ghostly reservoir that is Capel Celyn, one of the few remaining solely Welsh-speaking villages, drowned by Liverpool City Council.

Historian Matthew Green tells the extraordinary stories of how these places met their fate and probes the disappearances to explain why Britain looks the way it does today. Travelling across Britain, Green transports the listener to these places as they teeter on the brink of oblivion, vividly capturing the sounds of the sea clawing away row upon row of houses, the taste of medieval wine, or the sights of puffin hunting on the tallest cliffs in the country. We experience them in their prime, look on at their destruction and revisit their lingering remains later as they are mourned by evictees and reimagined by artists, writers and mavericks.

By exploring the lost causes and dead ends of history - places lost to natural phenomena, war and plague, economic shifts and technological progress - the precariousness of our own towns and cities, of humanity, becomes clear. Shadowlands is a deeply evocative and dazzlingly original account of Britain's past.

©2022 Matthew Green (P)2022 Audible, Ltd
Archaeology Civilization Europe Great Britain Western Europe England City War Village
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An amazing journey through our landscape

Absolutely fascinating, a brilliant book with detailed research read by a gifted storyteller and writer. Poignant, eloquent and a warning of losses to come.

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The concept of vanished or forgotten places and the impact on people's lives is haunting.

The reading is not great. There is a short rythym which began to annoy me as being more like a string of statements. There was no lightness of tone, pauses for depth , or change of pace.

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Great storytelling

After hearing the author on his book tour this summer, this book Shadowlands finally made it to the top of the pile. And I’m so glad it did. He tells the chapters of lost communities with the true art of a storyteller, bringing real people to life so they leap off the page — heroic, flawed and often sad. I started with the paperback, and finished on Audible, which made the storytelling aspect even more engrossing. Excellent.

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Thoroughly Depressing

If you fancy a thoroughly depressing book, written by a “right-thinking” proselytizer who loses no opportunity to preach to the reader and has lost academic focus in welter of “victim culture” bigotry, this is for you. Personally, I hated it and will not be going near anything else Green writes.

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