NOT DROWNED, JUST POISONED...

For me, it’s usually a building that inspires the plot of a book.  But for What Lies Beneath it was an entire village.    

    Quite near to where I live is a beautiful and mostly unspoilt village.  It’s chockfull of history – it’s home to the 1,000 year-old Horn Dance;  it’s mentioned in the Domesday Book, Henry VIII dissolved its monastery, and Dick Turpin stabled his horse at the local inn.  In the best tradition of all self-respecting English villages, it had a feudal family of overlords who have now almost died out.

    On the outskirts of this village is a massive reservoir, and there’s an elusive but wonderfully eerie legend that says the reservoir’s creation drowned a number of buildings.  In fact, at times, the legend expands in the telling, and describes how an actual hamlet, if not an entire village, lies beneath the reservoir. 

    It’s the kind of legend that’s always fascinated me.  A drowned village – streets, shops, a church, all lying silent and lost beneath thousands of gallons of water...

    However, it’s the kind of legend that’s fascinated other writers, as well, and that was the stumbling block.  The concept has been used several times and there’s even a term for the genre – reservoir noir.  So I thought I would have to abandon the idea.  But it persisted in my mind, and I delved a bit deeper into the tradition of lost villages.  

    Britain has a remarkable number of them.  Remote pockets that once were thriving communities, but that, for widely different reasons, now lie dead and silent, as if preserved under dusty amber glazes.  In the main, they were lost to the laws of enclosure, to coastal erosion or monastic depopulation.  Some were wiped out by disease – the Black Death in particular.   And, of course, there’s the famous account of how Henry VIII swept aside an entire Surrey village to build Nonesuch Palace.  Ironically, the Palace only lasted for about a hundred and fifty years, and then was demolished and its building materials sold to pay the gambling debts of one of Charles II’s mistresses.  More recently, villages and communities have been lost to less exotic causes – mostly motorways and by-passes. 

    And then, exploring deeper, I came across places that had been the subject of strange, even macabre, experiments.  The most famous is perhaps Gruinard Island – the ‘anthrax isle’ in Scotland – which was sealed off from the world for almost half a century.  And there are places such as Porton Down and Sellafield whose sometimes-contentious, occasionally-mysterious, research has become uneasily etched onto the fabric of England’s folklore. 

    Then I found a poem by Oliver Goldsmith called The Deserted Village, written in 1770.   One of the lines is –

    ‘Silent bats in drowsy clusters cling to those poisoned fields.’

    Could any writer be given a better image! 

    And that was when I came up with the idea of – not a drowned village, but a poisoned village.  An ordinary English village that had been the subject of an experiment during the Cold War.  But it was an experiment that went wrong, and the place had to be sealed up for the next fifty years. 

    What secrets can you hide inside a place closed to everyone for half a century?  Could the core of those secrets be trapped inside an old manor house, crumbling quietly away within the poisoned village?  My lost village, with all its dark and long-reaching secrets, suddenly became possible again. 

    My village is called Priors Bramley and it’s fictional.  But its counterpart can be found in many parts of Britain.