The Village That Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham

by Patrick Wright

Cover for The Village That Died for England: The Strange Story of Tyneham
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Summary

This is a book about the stories that lie hidden in the folds of an English landscape.
Tyneham is the archetypal 'lost village'; a Dorset hamlet in a beautiful valley evacuated for the sake of the Royal Armoured Corps' tanks during the Second World War, and never returned to its inhabitants despite 'Churchill's pledge' of restitution. It has lurked in the national imagination ever since, as a place of mythical rural innocence violated by the modern world: a symbol of a vanished England, a Thomas Hardy scene blasted by cannon. As film set or as the focus of campaigns for its restoration, Tyneham has become an enduring lost cause.
Patrick Wright does much more than tell the strange, comic, but also moving story of this village and its afterlife. That in itself is a tale in which the villagers and their former landlords are brought vividly to life, and it evokes a mysterious stretch of coastline that has drawn mystics and artists for over a century. As it describes the dramatic collision between tanks and the landscape of Old England, Wright's book also traces out the broader history of conservation and its place in out national imagination.

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