"Get in the Sea" Topic

"After hundreds of years of habitation, what causes a village, town or city to disappear? In the case of Capel Celyn in north Wales, it was water. In the late 1950s Liverpool was in need of a new reservoir to serve its growing population. In 1960 – bypassing the Welsh planning authorities – a bill was passed in Parliament to allow for the ‘development' of the village. Residents were served with eviction notices, the land was levelled, houses knocked down, corpses removed from the graveyard. Finally, in 1964, the water was released and the village was drowned.

The demise of Capel Celyn is the last of eight similarly ‘lost' settlements explored in Shadowlands. The earliest is Skara Brae, a neolithic village on the island of Orkney, where the use of local sandstone as a building material instead of wood means that we still encounter tangible traces of the lives of its residents today. Furniture, beds and other household objects remain within the remarkably well-preserved homes. The cause of Skara Brae's disappearance is less clear than Capel Celyn's, of course. One theory suggests that the technological advancements of the Bronze Age could have bypassed the village due to its remote location; another suggests that climate change could be the cause.

At Dunwich, a village in Suffolk that was once a powerful medieval port city which rivalled London in size, the climate was certainly the destructive force. A combination of coastal erosion and brutal storms in the 13th and 14th centuries brought about the gradual fall of much of the city into the sea. Winchelsea, near Rye on the south coast of England, survived a similar fate in the 1280s, becoming one of the reported 286 villages, parishes or islands in western Europe to be lost to the waves between 1099 and 1570…"

Main page

link

Our climate does and has changed for millenia, as the various ice ages and hot spells over time have shown, from the eras of the dinosaurs until today.

(smile)

Armand