It is this tantalizing sense of the almost-at-hand that informs the historian Matthew Green’s fascinating new tour of Britain’s lost towns and villages.

[Green] disinters their rich history and reimagines the lives of those who walked their streets, revealing 'tales of human perseverance, obsession, resistance and reconciliation'. By doing so, he makes tangible the tragedy of their loss and the threat we all face from the climate crisis on these storm-tossed islands.

By drawing on the slow erosion of places as remote as Orkney’s beehive-like community at Skara Brae, created before both Stonehenge and the Pyramids, Green uses the engulfing past to warn of future upheaval.

... not just a travelogue of scenic obsolescence. En route, the book offers us a gripping overview of humankind’s seemingly unstoppable evolution from primitive but harmless nomad to the rapacious bureaucrat in charge of civic planning in your neighborhood today.

Green is an historian, and Shadowlands is both meticulously researched and vividly imagined. The author has a novelist’s gift for bringing the past alive.

The account of the ruins’ archaeological uncovering in the 20th century is diverting enough, but details of the lost village and its culture are too sketchy to be truly moving; perhaps inevitably the most interesting chapters focus on later eras, where the most information and certainty are to be found.

Green’s haunting travelogue through Britain’s disappeared places is both an examination of the historical forces that led to their abandonment and a meditation on the presence of absence in physical and emotional landscapes.

As much as possible, Green puts readers in touch with these sites and their special cultures, now all forsaken..