Abandoned Villages

Yorkshire's abandoned village - Wharram Percy

Crumbling buildings that in a bygone age housed growing families, vanishing streets that once echoed to the gleeful screams of children. Is there anywhere riper for thoughts that drift to ghosts and spirits that surely linger, unwilling to leave their former home?

Such former settlements are scattered over these lands and always repay a visit, especially if you are prone to sentimentality or melancholia. These must be the loneliest places, once so vibrant but now mute and lost.

In Scotland they have more than their fair share of abandoned villages. As a woman who boasts some Scottish blood in her lineage it is with special regret and sadness to dwell on the infamous clearances when landowners decided, with shameful disregard for their tenants, to 'clear' whole settlements in the Highlands to make way for sheep, considered to be far more profitable a use of their land.


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One village that suffered this fate was Lawers on the banks of Loch Tay. Once the home of the famed prophetess, the Lady of Lawers, she was said to have foretold the clearance by the second Marquis in the early years of the nineteenth century which decimated the population of the area for nothing more than sheep farming.

Today the isolated village is nothing more than a collection of ruins accessed by a path from the Ben Lawers Hotel situated on the A827 nearby; but unlike many similar deserted settlements Lawers has acquired a reputation of being rather less restful than one would assume. Australian bar staff were in the habit of taking the fifteen minute walk to the picturesque ruins but some started to report a 'presence' at the site accompanied by a feeling of being watched, or worse, followed. The staff were previously unaware of the tales of haunting and the ghost of the White Lady, according to local legend the shade of the Lady of Lawers.



The area is steeped in folklore, much of it related to the prognostications of the prophetess. It is told that early last century a man was foolish enough to ignore the advice of neighbours and cut down a tree planted by the Lady. She had predicted many events that would correspond with heights that her tree would have reached at the time. She also foretold of tragedy for anyone who harmed the tree as the injudicious man who ignored the tale sadly found out. He was gored to death by his own bull and a friend who assisted him in the deed lost his mind and was committed to a mental asylum.

Written for me by the late Toby Ion, this website is dedicated to him.

Yorkshire's abandoned Village (BBC)