What Lies Beneath

Author’s Note

England has many ‘lost’ villages – remote pockets that once were thriving communities, but that, for widely different reasons, now lie dead and silent, as if preserved beneath dusty amber glazes.

In the main, they were lost to the laws of enclosure, to coastal erosion or monastic depopulation. But there are also plague villages, wiped out by the Black Death, villages – sometimes entire towns – drowned by the creation of reservoirs, rural communities and hamlets abandoned for no known or discoverable reason. Sadly, the histories and even the names of many of these have been lost, and all that remain are earthworks and perhaps a lonely church.

But there are also places that have been the subject of strange, even macabre, experiments. Gruinard Island – the ‘anthrax isle’ in the Scottish Highlands – sealed off from the world for almost half a century. Places such as Porton Down and Sellafield whos sometimes-contentious, occasionally-mysterious, research has become uneasily etched onto the fabric of England’s lore.

Priors Bramley is fictional. But its counterpart can be found in more than one village in England.