A journey back in time to the ghost village on Salisbury Plain
29.08.2023 - 06:35
/ theguardian.com
A line of London buses is crossing Salisbury Plain. It looks like someone has taken a red pen to the map. At the wheel of the leading bus is Peter Hendy, AKA Lord Hendy, AKA the boss of Network Rail. He’s a great man for old Routemasters, owns two, and is the driving force – literally – of this annual jaunt to the abandoned village of Imber.
“It’s the bus equivalent,” he says, raising his voice above the engine, “of going to the north pole.”
Well, up to a point. The journey only takes 25 minutes from Warminster, but does mean driving into the Salisbury Plain training area, Ministry of Defence land, usually off limits to civilians. Tanks, used for target practice, rust at the roadside. Ivy enshrouds caterpillar tracks and a crow perches on a gun barrel. Notices warn that, because of “unexploded military debris”, we should on no account leave the carriageway. The vibe is Summer Holiday meets A Bridge Too Far.
The training area covers a great splodge of Wiltshire. It is an odd mix of the bucolic and bellicose. Live firing takes place on most days of the year, and millions of large-calibre rounds have been discharged over the decades; yet more than half the area is a site of special scientific interest and it contains a couple of thousand ancient monuments. It is a good place to be a soldier, a stone-curlew, or a standing stone.
Imber, our destination this morning, was sacrificed to war. It had long been a byword for isolation: the loneliest village in England, so-called. There was even a rhyme about this: “Little Imber on the down / Seven miles from any town.” This remoteness helped it survive the Black Death, but what was an advantage in the 14th century had become a vulnerability by the 20th. Churchill’s government saw this as the ideal part of England to prepare for D-day. And so Imber was evacuated, residents given six weeks – until 17 December 1943 – to pack up and get out. The people believed they would return in peacetime, but this was not permitted. For almost 80 years it has been abandoned, a ghost village, or rather a corpse village – a body and name without a soul. Imber is laid out in the long green miles and most of the time goes unvisited, but every now and then there is a sort of wake.
Ding! Ding! The conductor rings his bell, and we disembark for Imber. The village is open to the public on a handful of occasions each year, including the August bank holiday weekend, but Imberbus day – which raises money for charity – has a particular atmosphere of cheery English whimsy that does not quite dispel the melancholy of the place.
Old photos show a chocolate-box village, but stepping off the bus one can see at a glance that all is changed. Gone are the cottages, whitewashed and thatched; the