From an Orkney settlement buried in sand five thousand years ago to a medieval city mouldering beneath the waves of the North Sea, Britain’s landscape is scarred with the haunting and romantic remains; these shadowlands that were once filled with life are now just spectral echoes.

Historian Matthew Green tells the stories of how these places met their fate, animating the people who lived, dreamed and died there and uncovering how their disappearances explain why Britain looks the way it does today. Travelling across Britain, Green transports the reader to these places as they teeter on the brink of oblivion, 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.

Matthew’s book, Shadowlands, is published in paperback today at £10.99

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