DESERTED roads and silent estates have become an all too familiar scene across the UK as the pandemic keeps us cooped up at home.
Just last week, Brits were warned city centres could become "ghost towns" if workers keep staying away – but all over the country, there are already a vast number of abandoned villages whose residents will never return.
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In fact, many were evacuated as a result of a different and much deadlier pandemic: the Black Death of the 1300s.
There are thought to be over 3,000 deserted medieval villages in England alone – but there are also much more recent examples of ghost towns in the UK, abandoned for entirely different reasons.
From the giant port town drowned by the sea to the southern villages seized by Churchill, here are some of Britain's most chilling ghost towns.
The sleepy town seized for WWII tank practice
Tyneham, Dorset
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With the bloody fight for survival against Hitler reaching a fever pitch, Churchill needed land to train soldiers ahead of the coming do-or-die invasion of Europe.
And that's why just before Christmas, 1943, 225 residents of the sleepy village of Tyneham in Dorset were ordered to temporarily leave.
The town was near to a military firing range and, with new and powerful tanks needing to be tested, the little village was too close for comfort.
Before they left the town, one resident nailed a hand-written note to the door of St. Mary's, the village's church.
"Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free," it read.
"We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly."
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But they never did – a compulsory purchase order for the land was made in 1948, making the village the property of the Ministry of Defence.
To this day, Tyneham is part of the closed Lulworth Ranges, where live-ammunition tests for tanks and other armoured vehicles are conducted.
Brits booted out as US troops trained for D-Day
Imber, Wiltshire
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The picturesque town of Imber in Wiltshire suffered a similar fate to Tyneham.
Its residents were ordered to leave in 1943 in order that American troops could use the village to practice street fighting ahead of D-Day.
Albert Nash, who had been the village's blacksmith for 44 years, was found by his wife sobbing over his anvil a couple of days after being told of the eviction.
"It was a bombshell dropped on the villagers. The elders were called together for a meeting in the schoolroom and when they were told, it was a complete surprise," Ken Mitchell, Nash's grandson, told the BBC.
"Albert was very upset and it hit him very hard. He moved to Bishops Cannings, near Devizes, but he had lost the will to live and only survived four or five weeks."
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The 155 evicted villagers were scattered around Salisbury Plain, and made repeated attempts to go back to Imber even into the 1970s.
To this day the town remains part of the Salisbury Plain Training Area, reserved for drilling soldiers in urban warfare.
Imber is now open to the public only a handful of bank holidays throughout the year and at Christmas.
Ghost island in the ocean
The Village, St Kilda
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It's thought that humans happily lived for 2,000 years on St Kilda – a remote archipelago around 100 miles off the Scottish mainland in the North Atlantic Ocean.
On the largest island in St Kilda, Hirta, the entire population was evacuated in 1930.
The locals were plagued by illness and crop failures and opted to be resettled on the Scottish mainland.
Cattle and sheep were taken on boats too, but the island's working dogs were all drowned in the bay.
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St Kilda stood untouched during the Second World War – save for three planes which crashed there – and it wasn't until 1957 that people returned when the MoD used it as part of a missile tracking range.
Nowadays, there are no permanent residents on St Kilda, but MoD staff, National Trust for Scotland staff, and scientific researchers can be found in small numbers.
The very last living native St Kildan, Rachel Johnson, died in 2016 at the age of 93 after having being evacuated when she was just eight years old.
City as big as ancient London swallowed by the waves
Dunwich, Suffolk
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Dunwich once matched 14th century London for size and was once the proud capital of the Kingdom of the Eastern Angles.
But nowadays little of the once-great town remains as, over time, the sea swallowed up most of its land and eight churches.
But throughout the 1300s, huge storms destroyed most of the port, sweeping hundreds of homes under the waves.
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And over time, coastal erosion further dragged Dunwich into decline, ultimately leading to its current state as a tiny town of a couple of hundred inhabitants.
It's now referred to as 'England's Atlantis', like other lost places around the UK.
The village that reemerges from the depths
Mardale Green, Cumbria
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While Dunwich slowly disappeared over hundreds of years, one village in the Lake District was drowned on purpose to make a new reservoir.
The lost settlement of Mardale Green was flooded in the late 1930s to create the Haweswater Reservoir to provide water for the city of Manchester.
Despite outcry from its small farming community, they were all made to move and all of the buildings were pulled down or blown up before the picturesque valley was flooded.
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Human remains were moved from Mardale's cemetery and the church was disassembled brick-by-brick, its stones later used to make a pier on the reservoir's shore.
Eerily, the ruins of the abandoned village occasionally reemerge from the depths when the water level drops below a certain point in long, hot summers.
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Many other villages around the UK have been lost due to the construction of reservoirs, including Nether Hambleton and Middle Hambleton which were destroyed in 1975 to make the Rutland Water reservoir.
After an outcry from residents, St Matthew's Church was preserved, and it now remains a solitary outpost on the edge of the water.
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