“Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again, where dead men meet, on lips of living men.” – Samuel Butler

We head to North Yorkshire in search of seclusion, grateful to be leaving the lowlands of our own county after months of housebound ennui. Keen to avoid fellow tourists as much as possible, we make our first stop pulling into a layby signalling ‘Wharram Percy - Deserted Medieval Village’. 

It is the first destination that we have circled in a thin line of red biro on the tattered road map pinched from my mother’s bookshelves. Legs cramped after hours on the A1, we hastily scoff our sandwiches in the car, hiding from the thick layer of mizzle that cloaks the Yorkshire Wolds – that deceptively heavy combination of mist and drizzle that soaks you to the skin in seconds. 

We follow a downwards snaking footpath along an ancient track that has been trodden by visitors to the village since 50 BC. Our path is halted by a gateway and a field of half-interested cows, sat in their vast bulks as if cemented to the wet grass. 

Our first sight of the ‘village’ is a desolate scene, faced with an 18th century farmhouse boarded up with black shutters that give the bleak building a wide-eyed look, as if staring out from empty sockets. Skirted by a wonky wooden fence, the overgrown grass tickles the lower panes of the front windows alongside abandoned animal troughs that have long stood empty. A sign fastened to the brick recalls the efforts of the ‘Wharram Percy Research Project – 1950-1990’s’, accompanied by a haunting line of poetry. 

Hordes of volunteers and archaeologists gathered here over those years each summer – the first significant group of people to occupy the village since the site’s abandonment in 1500, as six centuries of continuous occupation came to a halt. Staying in the farmhouse, I imagine them bringing all manner of personal debris incongruous to their surroundings; faded deck chairs, cigarettes and ceramic ashtrays, brown mugs and steaming flasks of coffee. Pulling away at one of the planks of wood nailed to the window frames, inside the empty kitchen I glimpse a Perspex tap over the metal sink and fight the urge to climb inside.  

On the grassy plateau high above us on the other side of the valley, ancient earthworks are discernible as faint ridges protruding from the ground – the remains of Middle Age longhouses, now coated in a silent sea of grass and cowpats. For such a quiet place, it rings loudly with the reverberations of the ages. 

Behind the farmhouse, the jagged form of the collapsed bell tower juts into the sky. The walls of the church of St. Martin - which, in the days of William the Conqueror, were entirely made of wood - stand solid in lichen-coated limestone. The last intact medieval building in the village, the church, is slowly succumbing to the elements. Sat low in the valley, it is entirely roofless and almost shocking in its naked exposure. 

Beautiful archways are rendered in the stone and we trace our fingers across elaborate engravings of crosses carved into its surface, patterned with splodges of lichen that look like chewing gum. Birds nest in the wooden rafters of the chancel and we both jump out of our skins as the heavy modern church door slams shut in a sudden gust of wind. The gravestone of two children from the 17th century hangs on the wall, the face of the stone splintered with large cracks.  

During the Black Death, the population of the village plummeted and it is one of the many contributions to the depopulation and eventual desertion of Wharram. A shiver passes over us in the graveyard beyond, where the stones of many different eras jut out of the unkempt grass and we read of the excavations of medieval skeletons. The evidence gathered attests to the folk beliefs of mutilating and even dismembering the bodies of the dead so as to prevent them from returning to interfere with the living, a practice once carried out by the village’s inhabitants. 

Crossing the low valley to the millpond, the crystal-clear water is sent into a shiver of ripples by a passing wind. We glimpse the darting movements of fish and imagine what must lie sunk in the silt below. We climb up to the hill overlooking the village, where the impressive Manor houses of yore once stood, belonging to the noble Percy family that gave the village its name. From here, we survey the wind-torn expanse of the Wolds that surrounds us, interrupted only by the leafy dale below. 

The grass is soft and bouncy underfoot as we follow the outlines of the bygone longhouses, peasant houses and animal pens. Chalk markings are still visible from the original digs in the 1950’s and occasionally we pass a tourist sign with the black and white photographs of that time, trying to make sense of what lies in the ground in front of us. Now occupied only by livestock, ghostly snippets of sheep’s wool caught in the trees blow in the wind as they have done here for centuries since lowland farmers relied on this land for pasture. 

I imagine the hardy folk that called this remote place their home, forging a life in this wild landscape. Making to leave, arm in arm, we are grateful to be met with the smiling face of a border terrier bounding over the hill, accompanied by its two neon-coated owners, part of the new wave of people that still visit this place. Abandoned, but not forgotten, the village still lingers in our minds.