By Becca Sebire
Silence. Light filters through the trees above, creating shadows on the floor beside an assortment of roofless houses.
Crouched in a dilapidated stance, the broken homes are frozen in a time lapse from almost eighty years ago.
This is Tyneham village.
A miniscule hamlet set in the rolling hills of Purbeck – embalmed for all eternity in the year 1943.
Tiny traces of a time where life was very different wait pointlessly to be useful again: A rusty fire grate, a sign advertising telegrams, an aged telephone box with the – once scarlet – paint peeling.
For such an (ironically) peaceful place, Tyneham has a heart-rending story. Its inhabitants were evicted from their beloved homes four years into the Second World War in order for the town to be used for military practice.
Despite hopes, they never returned. To this day it is still the property of the army – although anybody can visit when it is not being used for that purpose. Villagers were ever hopeful to go back and asked that their town be looked after, in a note pinned to the church door.
Tyneham, left untouched, would have probably ended up like other Dorset towns – with housing estates and farming modernised by pesticides and new machinery. Instead, it remains a living memory and a gateway to Dorset’s past.
Pegs in the schoolroom belong to children who are currently grandparents with silvery hair and a vague memory of a village where the ghosts of people exist only in sepia photographs.
Ivy clings to graves whose inhabitants have long been forgotten in the dust of time; nobody is left to put flowers by their headstones.
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