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On 1 November 1943, the villagers of Imber on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire gathered together in a school room and awaited an announcement on local military training with some trepidation. The news they were given, even if not unexpected by some, was extreme: all villagers would have to leave Imber by the 17 December that year – only 47 days away. The site was being requisitioned fully by the War Department, and their tenants in this village would have to leave, to sell their livestock and produce, to move any possessions, and to start life elsewhere. Although the settlement had been surrounded by military training areas for many years, this must have come as an almighty shock. Henceforth, Imber was going to be used for urban operations by the British and the American armed forces in preparation for the beach landings and hoped-for liberation of Western Europe that many believed to be coming soon. Many of the villagers, though, were remarkably stoic about being uprooted – this was, after all, ‘total war’, and this would be Imber’s contribution to the war effort. Several members of the community were already away serving in the armed forces, and people were well aware of the sacrifices being made across the nation. Moreover, there were other villages that had suffered the same fate of requisition, with West Tofts in Norfolk and Tyneham in Dorset being well-known examples.
Come the end of the war in 1945, and most of the villagers expected to be able to return to their houses and farms, to begin life once again, and to repair the inevitable damage that the tramping of hundreds of military boots along with heavy machinery and explosives would have caused (protection measures that had put in place on the structures notwithstanding). They believed that the government had given them an assurance that, once everything was over, they could all go home. And yet the authorities insisted that no such statement had been made – that this was all now training land and that it would, in any case, be far too dangerous to return, as tanks, aircraft, explosions, and major exercises would be commonplace in and around the village in perpetuity. So the controversy of Imber was born, and demonstrations about its future and the fate of the villagers of the 1940s continued for decades. Even today, the subject still raises very strong feelings and a sense of injustice, even though almost nobody with a personal memory of the village in its old form survives.
Visiting a ghost village
Nowadays, the prospect of anybody actually living in Imber again seems very far-fetched. Even the most robust of the old village buildings – the Nag’s Head cottages, Seagram’s Farm, the Bell Inn, and Imber Court – are brick shells with corrugated roofs, and this footprint has been in-filled with more modern breeze-block constructions to represent housing from the later part of the 20th century. The church of St Giles alone stands in its own island of historic building conservation, designated as a Grade I-listed structure thanks to an extensive programme of restoration and conservation by its new owners, the Churches Conservation Trust (CCT). This work included the enhancing of wonderful wall paintings depicting church bell-peal changes, soul-weighings, and, rather marvellously, a scene representing the sin of ‘Avarice’ or ‘Greed’, whereby a number of demons (one of whom looks suspiciously like Mickey Mouse) drag a medieval man clutching bags of coins towards the mouth of hell and a grisly eternity within its depths.
Funerals still take place within the churchyard of St Giles (you need a direct personal connection for this), and the bells still ring occasionally during services and events organised by the CCT – pealing out over downland as they have for centuries, calling to ghosts from many years ago. While only open to the public on selected days, it is an eerie place to visit at night (probably even more so if you are on exercise), a place where most trappings of ‘civilisation’ are redundant. Not only is there an utter absence of phone reception in the area, but there is no street lighting either, and so the stars and night skies are often fabulous. Nature has returned to the village, too, with owls and bats accompanying the evenings, and deer often seen walking through the woods.
On many nights, however, and certainly during most days, this sleepy ‘ghost’ village is almost as busy as its living neighbours in wider Wiltshire – although, admittedly, with fewer amenities. Imber is one of the most-used facilities on the UK’s training areas, providing vital experience to troops who will potentially be facing urban operations in their military careers. Although bespoke sites have been constructed for this purpose, Imber still continues to be an essential asset for the military, just as it was in the days leading up to D-Day. Regrettably, warfare has never gone away, and the tempo faced by the British Army is still incredibly high, with new requirements being placed on training features: Imber and its environs are an important element in many of these exercises, an invaluable environment for soldiers to familiarise themselves with urban situations.
All elements of military training on the estate are monitored incredibly carefully, both environmentally and archaeologically – it often surprises people to learn that the MOD has its own archaeologists. On Salisbury Plain – given the importance of this most magical of landscapes – the management regime sees all military digging cleared beforehand by an ecologist and an archaeologist. As Senior Archaeologist for the MOD’s Defence Infrastructure Organisation, I have noticed more and more requests coming around Imber, and felt that my general knowledge of the site, while reasonable, was somewhat lacking for the middle of the village. Imber is named in Domesday Book and is also listed as ‘Imemerie’ in an earlier charter of AD 967. We know that there are Roman settlements nearby, too, not to mention the plethora of prehistoric burial mounds bearing witness to even earlier settlement on this part of the Plain. Although much of the heart of the village is now apparently vacant, returned to open fields, farms once thrived there – so, what still lies beneath the turf, and would military digging be detrimental to an archaeological layer that we can no longer see?
Salisbury Plain’s Pompeii
These were the questions that prompted a season of fieldwork in the summer of 2023, carried out under the leadership of Wessex Archaeology and using the skills and labour of the military veteran and volunteer programme known as Operation Nightingale (an initiative that has been operating for over a decade; see CA 282, 306, 338, 339, 346, 354, and 383 to read more about some of its excavations). Their focus was on land immediately north of the church, where they hoped to locate Brown’s Farm and farmyard, other village amenities, and a house on the small road called Church Row which lay, not surprisingly given the name, on the street leading to the porch of St Giles. For this latter exploration, we even had a charming photograph of Imber from the turn of the 20th century, showing village families standing outside a structure that no longer exists.
Our first step was geophysical survey to augment historical mapping and aerial photography, and this revealed a series of anomalies that helped Wessex Archaeology’s Phil Andrews to place our trenches. Imber is sited on a winterbourne, with the spring- fed rivers running freely in the early months of most years, although the path of this watercourse today runs though covered channels alongside the road of the ribbon-development of the old settlement. One of our first trenches was placed adjacent to the hedgerow that now lies above the old stream route, and the feature that we uncovered there soon proved to have a fittingly water-related function.
Unlike most of our other trenches, this one got deeper and deeper – so much so that we never reached the bottom – and was found to be filled with all sorts of detritus from the abandonment of the village: plates and bottles, an iron, a scythe, horseshoes, and ploughshares. We had found the old village pond, which had served as a convenient dumping point for the departing villagers. In many ways, this was a glimpse of a Salisbury Plain-style Pompeii, producing material traces of the abrupt end of a settlement, with a known date, and from which there would be no return. Fewer mosaics, though, it must be said.
Just south of the pond, and immediately below the ground surface, were carefully laid brick courses set into the chalk: the perimeter wall of Brown’s Farm. Although much had been robbed out, enough remained to show the shape of the farmyard, and the brickwork was sturdy enough that military digging would be extremely difficult were one to encounter the structure. The perimeter was made of a mixture of stone, chalk block, and brick courses – some of which were even visible as parch-marks in the hot early summer of 2023 – and although these were foundations, we could see repairs to the walls, indicating the effort that had gone into maintaining the settlement.
Building on the past
More foundations emerged in the majority of our other trenches, picking out structures that are visible on the old Ordnance Survey maps, as well as some outbuildings that had not been mapped. Digging around Church Row, though, led us back far further in time – and provided some of our nicer finds. On the location of the house depicted in our photograph, the team concentrated on the rear of the site, and immediately found pieces of glass, iron, and rubble – demolition material – as well as abundant fragments of willow pattern pottery. The deeper we got, the more interesting things became. Several sherds of shiny black ceramic soon emerged: highly decorated with raised designs, they were identifiable as coming from an earlier 19th-century Jackfield ware vessel – a teapot, in fact. Given that almost all of the other pottery that was found at this level was pretty basic and deadly utilitarian, the team speculated that this teapot was probably one of the more prized possessions of the house’s inhabitants – even guessing at it being, perhaps, a wedding present.
As for the house itself, we recovered a range of structural elements, including clay roof ridge-tiles and also stone tiles for the roof with nail holes still surviving, as well as wall structures that were not recorded on any of our maps. The upper-level walls were built in classic Wiltshire vernacular form, with a mixture of flint and brick, but there were two other walls running beneath this, with at least one at a perpendicular. From these we could pick out a series of phases of housing development, as well as pieces of worked stone that included elements of an ornate window mullion from an important building. This was a prime ‘real estate’ location, being on the road to the church, and thus the several rebuild phases of the house were expected.
Speaking of the church, St Giles stands on the site of a 12th-century structure, with the nave having been built towards the end of the 13th century. The quality of this building testifies to the importance of medieval Imber, and we were keen to find some evidence of our Church Row house being at the heart of the village at this time. Typically, this evidence was forthcoming right at the end of our excavation period. At the eastern end, below the earliest of the flint wall structures, we uncovered a series of post-holes, as well as fragments of 13th-/14th-century green-glazed pottery. We thus had a palimpsest of housing redevelopment from medieval to modern.
What of the end of this house’s life? One of the last families to live on the site was the Rebbeck family – indeed, in the photograph we had been using to help us reconstruct the house were two small twin girls, Daisy and Ivy Carter, and Daisy would marry George Rebbeck and would live in this dwelling. George was serving in the Navy and was on leave at Imber when news of the evacuation was given. From our point of view, the most incredible thing was discovering that one of the dig team was a direct relative of Daisy, and had been working inside this house with no knowledge of her ancestral link to the story of the structure.
Military mementos
After the Rebbecks left the house and the military took full control of the village, many of the houses were initially protected from the rigours of infantry manoeuvres. By 1945, though, there was certainly enough damage to make it extremely unlikely for anyone to be able to return. Our excavations reflected this period, recovering a chronology of military detritus from modern blank rifle rounds through to copper driving bands of artillery shells – certainly enough to provide a degree of nostalgia to the veterans from Operation Nightingale. The American troops who also trained here were more archaeologically elusive, however. The only item linked to their presence that we excavated was a single, fired, blank cartridge case. This was, very helpfully, stamped with the manufacturer’s details, as is typical for ammunition: SL 43, signifying that the case had been made in the St Louis Arsenal, Missouri, in 1943. This, above all our other finds, is an artefact that marks the end of village life at Imber, and the start of its ongoing military role.
The dig itself took place during a military training exercise, and was a constant source of bafflement to many of the soldiers of 2023, who thought we had been added to provide complexity to their task. The people playing the part of ‘villagers’ in the exercise were fascinated too, and would visit the excavations in breaks from training to see on how much of ‘their old village’ had been uncovered. We had plenty to show them: our work has demonstrated the long history of the village, how its houses developed over time, and that, although no longer surviving as extant structures, extensive traces of the farm complexes are still present below the turf in the open spaces around the church. From a curatorial point of view, the project was extremely useful: the building foundations are still solid and would be very difficult to dig through so, even setting aside their heritage value, exercises will now be directed to avoid areas on the old maps that show the old Imber buildings, and indeed will move away from anything on the geophysical surveys or close to the dwellings on Church Row.
Eighty years after Operation Overlord and the momentous events of D-Day, the village of Imber still plays a role in world events, still makes its sacrifice to the country, and is still remembered in the nation’s psyche. Its church bells still ring out periodically, and flowers are left in the churchyard even though the sounds of livestock at Brown’s Farm, of children playing in Church Row, and of blacksmithing and tennis matches around Imber Court or Seagram’s Farm have long since ceased. Imber is generally referred to as a ‘ghost’ village, but it is still populated regularly – albeit today it is the sound of the military that resonates, with the medieval village as a backdrop memory.
All images: © Harvey Mills, unless otherwise stated
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