Probably my favourite place in the world is a little known church ruins inside a small overgrown clump of trees on the banks of a river near to where I currently live. Only a handful of people know the place exists, and nobody but me ventures inside the overgrown wooded area which contains the moss covered remnants of what was once a beautiful 12th century church.

I stumbled upon the place when I was 15 or 16, and the site and it's history has captivated me ever since.

Although the church ruins are the only visible remains, there was once a whole village around them, until it was mysteriously abandoned around the year 1810.

Information about the village has been hard to come by. There is practically nothing on the internet, and until recently, searching libraries and local records has only yielded tantalysing snippets of information. Two reasons have been given for why the village was abandoned. One reason was that it kept flooding, and the other was an outbreak of bubonic plague. I keep an open mind, but the flooding theory is questionable to my mind because the few surviving pictures of the settlement show the buildings well above a level that the river could ever rise to. The plague theory is also highly doubtful, due to the date of the abandonment.

Recently, I have found census records for the village, on microfilm at a records office in a town some miles away. For the first time, I could see the names of the folks who lived there, and actually managed to follow the lineage of many of them to the present day. What really excited me was that the church itself was occupied by a poor family long after the other villagers had deserted the place, until the early half of the last century in fact, and their descendants are still in the area. I've even had a beer with them in the local pub!

When I go to those ruins now, I can picture the church as it was a century ago, the last standing building of a deserted village, and picture those inhabitants who stayed there long after the village was supposed to be abandoned. I know their names now, and I feel strangely close to them when I visit the site. They didn't give up on the village, and I wonder if my fascination with the place comes through them? As if they have somehow guided me to care about a place that has been sadly forgotten?