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Abandoned, Disused & Ruined Places

maximus otter said:
I have a small piece myself, in my “Cabinet of Curiosities”.

maximus otter
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I think I've got a small piece. My girlfriend at the time was in Berlin and brought it back for me .. the problem was she didn't collect it herself from source but bought it from a local, some enterprising locals at the time were selling spray painted smashed up concrete bits they'd made themselves so I'll never know if it's genuine or not .... it came in one of those little plastic 'sealy' bags mostly used by fishermen and weed dealers and also contains a photo card of the event so I like it anyway. I'll try and find it and post a pic.

 
John Peel had a piece of the Berlin Wall sent to him by a German friend. He kept it until he realised all he was keeping was a lump of useless concrete, and the excitement quickly wore off.
 
GNC said:
John Peel had a piece of the Berlin Wall sent to him by a German friend. He kept it until he realised all he was keeping was a lump of useless concrete, and the excitement quickly wore off.
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You can still buy little fragments of it in Berlin. Didn't appeal to me; it wasn't just a lump of useless concrete, it was part of something I'd grown up despising.

OTOH I once came across a packaged-up fragment of HM Tower of London rubble from some building work there, an official tourist souvenir.
Gave it to Escet for his American boss who was suitably impressed.
 
Maybe I'm a cynic, but having seen those little bags in Berlin containing a piece of the Berlin wall., I can't help wondering if it circled the globe several times over. Someone with bags of cement a cans of spraypaint is making a small fortune.
 
I went here about 12 years ago, must have the pics on a hard drive somewhere.

In the ruins of an old croft, four walls of rock gradually crumble into the earth. Nettles sprout from a thick carpet of fallen autumn leaves. The remnants of an old fireplace can still be made out. A birch tree sprouts through the spectre of an old doorway. Branches claw at the moss-covered stones. The void of an old window looks out on to wild shrubbery and weeds.

Outside this ruin, the most intact of the homes in the lost village of Pitmiddle, neighbouring buildings have deteriorated to little more than mounds of earth and piles of stones. Some have vanished completely. The modest stream which once proved this community’s lifeblood courses across a muddy plain between the trees.

Where children once played and farmers toiled, a woodland is thriving and nature is reclaiming a lost community.

“You’d have thought the devil or some ghost had stepped this way, and that the inhabitants had dropped everything and fled – never to return," wrote Colin Gibson in his Nature Diary in The Courier on February 5 1955, after visiting this very spot.

etc
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https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/new...left-the-sad-story-of-taysides-ghost-village/
 
The whole lost village, DMV (Deserted Mediaeval Village) phenomenon is one of the things that started my interest in archaeology and the like. I can remember going with my grandfather when he was acting as locum and taking a service in one of the Lincolnshire Wolds' churches.

He stopped the car on the way back and lifted me up to stand on the top of a barred gate. He spent a long time pointing out to me the hillocks and mounds, talking about where the winter light caught the banks and ditches at a raking angle, bringing out the detail. He went into details and I started to see the whole structure of the village: where there was a main thoroughfare, where the gaps for doors were, the patch of nettles in each "house" which showed a difference in the soil and might indicate the fireplace.

Then we drove on 100m and looked at the fields on the other side of the road - reverse-S ploughing strips, rig and furrow. Again he spent time pointing out the features. I remember it being bitterly cold and the light fading even as we looked.

I was about four, maybe nearly five and three years away from starting to talk verbally.

And one of the lessons is, assume competency. Selective, elective or total mutism doesn't let you presume anything about the mental capacity or the personality of the person.

He (Taid) and my grandmother (Nain) were natural teachers and I am very lucky to have been brought up by them. I miss them greatly.
 
Still trying to find my pics from Pitmiddle - it was late 2006 or early 2007 - got lots of files from then but just can't find those ones. Grrrr.
What I remember is that it was one of the spookiest places I've ever been to. The fact that it was a winter's day with thick fog added to the feeling. There was just an intense silence there, didn't hear any birds or wildlife, very eerie.
 
Haven't found my Pitmiddle pics but I did find some from Forgan Church, just outside Tayport in Fife. Although I buggered about to make the pics look a bit spooky it was a really tranquil place - except when I was buzzed by a buzzard as I was walking beside a wall. The buzzard came swooping round a corner and missed me by inches.
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The old Bull Ring in Birmingham in it's death throes in the early 2000s. One of the creepiest experiences I ever had was standing on those steps(top right picture) and looking down into that huge deep void with some market stalls below. The creepy part is that it was totally deserted. Empty, but I could still hear faint sounds of city life coming from a million miles away.

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heisenbear said:
The old Bull Ring in Birmingham in it's death throes in the early 2000s. One of the creepiest experiences I ever had was standing on those steps(top right picture) and looking down into that huge deep void with some market stalls below. The creepy part is that it was totally deserted. Empty, but I could still hear faint sounds of city life coming from a million miles away.

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I can just about picture the old Bull Ring if I close my eyes and concentrate hard. Somehow, it seems longer ago than the turn of the century that it all changed.

Mind you, it was bloody awful. The new centre, with its fancy Selfridges and everything else, is many times better. Civilised, almost (though we are still talking about Birmingham).
 
Peripart said:
I can just about picture the old Bull Ring if I close my eyes and concentrate hard. Somehow, it seems longer ago than the turn of the century that it all changed.

Mind you, it was bloody awful. The new centre, with its fancy Selfridges and everything else, is many times better. Civilised, almost (though we are still talking about Birmingham).
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I used to hang around in there before the expression mallrat was even invented with my mates. I can still remember the radio jingle ..
 
I loathed the old bull ring shopping centre. Just saying!
 
Frideswide said:
The whole lost village, DMV (Deserted Mediaeval Village) phenomenon is one of the things that started my interest in archaeology and the like. I can remember going with my grandfather when he was acting as locum and taking a service in one of the Lincolnshire Wolds' churches.
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So heartfelt and uplifting..

Don't live that far from Roxburgh and there was a super, 'Time Team' episode which encapsulates your sentiments.

'The Lost City of Roxburgh'

 
GNC said:
John Peel had a piece of the Berlin Wall sent to him by a German friend. He kept it until he realised all he was keeping was a lump of useless concrete, and the excitement quickly wore off.
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I've mentioned this in other threads but I've been to Berlin many times since a school trip in 1978 and remained friends with the son of the family I stayed with.

The physical presence of the whole structure (walls, tank traps, mine strips, watch towers etc) the fact that it surrounded the whole of West Berlin and the experience of crossing into the East made a huge impression on a sensitive and imaginative 15yr old. And the first hand accounts that I heard from my host mother and father, of life before, during and after its construction, put flesh and blood, as it were, onto the concrete edifice.


I went for another of my many visits shortly after the wall fell but before unification. The wall was very much still there but, on a visit to the woods around Wannsee, I found a section with a big gap in it. I walked through and looked at the partially demolished section with it's empty watch tower, cleared mine strip etc. I was overwhelmed by how the whole structure, this vast, man-made edifice; an embodiment of human fear, intolerance and aggression, was now impotent, ruined, dead.

I have a piece of the wall that my friend had chiselled off for me. Yes, it is just a lump of concrete but for me it represents so much more.
 
For me, I would mourn the dead that were killed because of the wall before I would want to "commemorate" the concrete, if you see what I mean. I know it's representative, but I wouldn't have a lump of brick from a concentration camp in my possession either. It's not a matter of superstition, or I don't think so.
 
It's impossible for me to imagine wanting a brick from a concentration camp, but I'd have different feelings for a piece of the Berlin Wall. I'll have to mull over why, since I don't even have the associations that Pandacracker has. Somehow the wall feels linked to overcoming limits and violent controls, but concentration camps for me can't shed their misery and horror. Maybe because their power was destroyed from outside, while the Wall was overcome and destroyed from inside.
 
IbisNibs said:
It's impossible for me to imagine wanting a brick from a concentration camp, but I'd have different feelings for a piece of the Berlin Wall. I'll have to mull over why, since I don't even have the associations that Pandacracker has. Somehow the wall feels linked to overcoming limits and violent controls, but concentration camps for me can't shed their misery and horror. Maybe because their power was destroyed from outside, while the Wall was overcome and destroyed from inside.
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Maybe a brick from a gulag would be a more apt comparison, except you pretty much still get those, even if they're not called that anymore.
 
HAUNTING CHALKBOARD DRAWINGS, FROZEN IN TIME FOR 100 YEARS, DISCOVERED IN OKLAHOMA SCHOOL

Source: archaeology-world.com
Date: 27 January, 2020

Sherry Read Math teacher Classroom is a total mess. The students are gone for the summer, and light fixtures dangle from the ceiling.

There is a dust layer on the floor. The worker’s rackets down the corridor during the refurbishment of the school, which dates back to the 1890s. They’re working in what has become an archaeological site.

Another discovery was made earlier this month by a construction crew from Oklahoma City School.

They found old chalkboards with class lessons that were written almost a century ago, and chalk drawings still in remarkably good condition. So Read doesn’t mind the mess. In fact, she’s amazed.

“It’s like touching history, like being a part of what was going on during the day,” she says. “It’s just remarkable and mysterious, trying to figure out what some of this was.”

The biggest mystery is an old multiplication wheel. It’s a circle with factors on the inside and other numbers on the outside. No one can figure it out.

But there’s no mystery about when the lessons were written. It was 1917, right after Thanksgiving. There is a turkey and pilgrim theme in every room.

One picture shows a little girl feeding a turkey. She’s in a pink and white knee-length dress and stockings; bright yellow curls frame her face. The picture is intricate, so detailed it must have been drawn by a teacher’s hand.

There’s also music and civics lessons, and rules for keeping clean. A vocabulary list highlights words like “blunder” and “choke” written in smooth cursive. Even the word “whoa” is listed because many people got around on horse and buggy back then.

Also on the board, a list of student names frozen in time.

“We’re not sure if that meant they were good students for the day, or they accomplished that,” Read says. “Or were their names up there because they were bad for the day?”

These snapshots are fragile. A simple, misplaced elbow can wipe them away. So school officials are now trying to figure out the best way to preserve Briley of the Oklahoma Historic

https://www.archaeology-world.com/h...-for-100-years-discovered-in-oklahoma-school/
 
Mythopoeika said:
Interesting collection of places here:
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Fascinating locations, but what a bland sounding narrator, and what a weird choice of background music! Sounds like a business promo film.
("Here are some great locations for your franchise: The cinema at the end of the world! The abandoned amusement park where two patrons were killed! The dilapidated steel plant that is an historical monument!)
 
The village of Al Madam (near Dubai) is being reclaimed by the desert. It's unclear what led to its abandonment, but it's become a word-of-mouth tourist attraction ...
Mysterious abandoned village becomes a lure for intrepid travelers

The village of Al Madam is being gradually reclaimed by the desert.

Outlines of former homes are still visible but the all-consuming sand rolls in like waves, pouring through the windows, filling the courtyards, and sweeping away the furniture.

Less than an hour's drive from the city of Dubai, just over the border into Sharjah, this neatly planned outpost featuring two rows of homes and an elegant mosque has been left to its fate.

There are indications that inhabitants may have departed in a hurry; doors wide open, personal effects left in a jumble. These haunting memoirs have fueled stories that Al Madam is a "ghost village" where the residents fled from supernatural forces.

Not a soul remains to tell its story. But Al Madam has become an increasingly attractive destination for thrill-seeking visitors. ...

In the absence of definitive information on the cause of the village's abandonment, rumors of supernatural influence have circulated widely.

Residents of nearby villages share stories about an evil djinn -- or genie -- haunting Al Madam, specifically Umm Duwais, a female spirit with cat's eyes and machetes for hands.

In 2018, the Sharjah Art Foundation (SAF) conducted a public consultation to trace the history of the village.

The SAF shared transcripts of interviews with respondents from the local area with CNN - including a man who claimed to have been married in Al Madam - which suggest the village was built in the mid 1970s. In several cases these attribute the villagers' departure to ferocious sandstorms that rendered the village uninhabitable.

An alternative explanation comes from Yasser Elsheshtawy, a professor of architecture at Columbia University.

Elsheshtawy has extensively the studied the introduction of "Sha'bi housing" in the UAE from the late 1960s, the government's nationwide program to provide modern public housing for its nomadic Bedouin population as part of the wider modernization drive following the discovery of oil reserves. ...

Some of the new settlements were assembled so rapidly that infrastructure was not always in place, says Elsheshtawy, which may have led to Bedouins abandoning them. The SAF's interviews indicate that Al Madam lacked electricity.

"What we came across a lot through our research was families complaining that they had moved in (to a new settlement) and lived for months without water or electricity," he says. "In this instance if the infrastructure was not provided, people may have moved in initially and then left." ...
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FULL STORY: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/al-madam-abandoned-village-uae/index.html
 
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