Abandoned Communities

The Abandoned Communities website focuses on those villages in Great Britain, which are no longer populated. In the case of some of the communities featured on this site one single event led to their abandonment, while in the case of others it was a more gradual process.

There is a wide geographical representation on this site. You can learn about the medieval community of Kenfig in Glamorgan, South Wales, which was absorbed into the sand cast up by the Severn estuary. Or you could discover more about the fate of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire where tenants were evicted in order to create space for a sheep pasture in the fifteenth century. Communities from more recent times are also included. There is a section devoted on the Welsh villages, which regardless of the thriving communities that existed there were flooded in order to create reservoirs for Liverpool. The Second World War also saw some communities disappear. Both Imber, on the Salisbury Plain and Mynydd Epynt in the Brecon Beacons were seized by the War Office to be used for military training, even when the war did end the former residents were not allowed back.

The Abandoned Communities website is extremely interesting for anyone who wants to research the reasons for why some communities vanish. Detailed explanations are given for why each featured community was abandoned, and when reading about those abandoned communities you gain a feeling of the loss and heart ache the inhabitants must have felt when they were forced to leave.