Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Village of the Damned


This is fabulously strange and creepy. More underwater wreckage, this time of the lost village of Llanwddyn in wales, flooded by Liverpool Council in 1965. The recentness of the flooding makes the images far stranger and more disturbing for me, as if the inhabitants have only just turned off an episode of Z Cars before packing their bags and leaving. The preserved cemetery suggests perhaps that they didn't make it, or refused to go.



Nevertheless the images are eerily beautiful, reminiscent of Mariele Neudecker's vitrines in their mysterious vividness. Like Neudecker's miniature landscapes submerged in water they have an air of unreality about them suggestive of some macabre model built to frighten children. In this case though the images are of a real place.



The pictures are taken from the BBC Wales website (where there is also a video), found, fabulously enough, via the Springfield School in Sheffield who seem to be doing a project on flooding and drowned villages. Don't ask me how I came across the school's website. I think it has a link back to a post I did on Ladybower reservoir but I can't find it.