This English county is stuffed with ghost cities and deserted villages

Norfolk is legendary for its flatlands, its countless skies and infinite horizons, a bike owner’s paradise.

It’s a magnet for followers of the outside too and with 90 miles of shoreline, there may be loads of selection, from sandy beaches to hovering cliffs, shingle spits, salt marshes and estuaries full of items of historical past to fish out.

But there’s one other, extra urgent factor about Norfolk that is not well-known.

The county, residence to round 1,000,000 individuals, is full of misplaced and forgotten villages.

Hundreds of deserted settlements are peppered all through Norfolk, round 200 in all.

The motive why these locations have been left behind are tenfold and got here at completely different factors in historical past. 

There are deserted medieval villages (DMVs), relocated or shrunken villages, ones misplaced to coastal erosion, in addition to those who had been evacuated due to conflict, by no means to be repopulated.

Some have vanished so fully that there are now not any traces of them, whereas others trace at their former glory with dilapidated buildings and incomplete stone outhouses.

Six villages within the south-west of the county had been taken over by the Ministry of Defence in World War Two to be able to practice troopers getting ready for the liberation of Europe.

These embrace West Tofts, Sturston, Langford, Stanford, Buckenham Tofts and Tottington which had been all evacuated. Residents there have been advised they may return after the conflict however by no means did — the army stayed within the space for years afterwards.

Along the coast, there are complete villages which were eaten up by the water: Shipden, Ness and Eccles-on-Sea, whose church stood solitary for years earlier than sinking beneath the water stage.

Around 1,000 years in the past a gaggle of monks got land close to to the River Bure. While their settlement has lengthy gone right this moment, Rowan Mantell notes in Great British Life that “traces of a grand abbey can still be seen, but the main church of St Benet’s is long gone”. 

In different settlements, she notes, solely the outdated church buildings stay.

Some ghost villages have nearly misplaced their former locations of worship, the church nearly crumbling in Babingley, close to King’s Lynn.

At Bixley, within the north, the one parish church in England devoted to St Wandregesilius was nonetheless used into the twentieth century.

Now, nonetheless, it stands burnt-out and useless, hovering above rolling hills which mark the previous web site of the village.

At Godwick too, the stays of the village’s church are naked: stripped again nearly to nothing. But it’s considered one of Norfolk’s best-preserved deserted settlements, the define of outdated streets and buildings hiding beneath the grass.

It is believed that the individuals of Godwick moved out of the village round 400 years in the past however guests can to this present day wander round its derelict thoroughfares.

One of its highlights is a barn, constructed by Sir Edward Coke in 1597 which is right this moment used as a marriage venue.