Some of the most remarkable lost artefacts from the ancient world were the titanic wrecks of the Nemi ships.

In their 1st century heyday they held gardens, palaces & baths in a floating wonderland. But barely a decade after their recovery, they were lost forever. For centuries, the fishermen who sailed in the placid waters of Lake Nemi, 30km south of Rome, knew a secret.

It was said that the rotting timbers of a gigantic ancient wreck lurked below the water's quiet surface.

(📷 Kleuske; Google)

A thread-of-threads on the ruined places I've visited and the folklore that surrounds them. My visit to the abandoned East Somerton Church on the Anglian coast, where the strange story of a witch and her wooden leg still haunts this ivy-covered ruin.

https://twitter.com/PaulMMCooper/status/990592780320821254

Heading out into the Norfolk countryside today to find the ruin of a church that was supposedly struck by lightning, and looking into the myth of the demon dog of the broads. The All Saints Church in Billockby was a fine flint-built church first built in the middle ages, but with most of the surviving stone dating back to the 15th century.

One of the world's most haunting ruined places is the ghost town of Kolmanskop, in the desert of Southern Namibia.

Once a thriving mining town, it now sits in an enormous "restricted zone" where people are still forbidden to enter, and is slowly being reclaimed by the sands. One evening in 1908, a humble railway worker named Zacherias Lewala was working on the rails in the Southern Namib desert, shovelling them clear of the sand dunes that constantly roll over the land.

While working, he saw some strange-looking stones shining in the evening light.

Many thanks to @LibraryArabLit for sending me this beautiful copy of "War Songs", a new collection of poetry by the 6th-century poet Antarah ibn Shaddad. ʿAntar was a knight and adventurer, and wrote poetry about his battles and loves, as well as meditations on a world falling into ruin.

Throughout history, people have tried to imagine the past by looking at ruins.

One of the most failed attempts to do so was the 1854 Assyrian Court exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace. Widely mocked & reviled by the public, it was finally destroyed in the most fitting manner. The Crystal Palace was a revolutionary building. It used the new technologies of sheet glass & cast iron to create a 92,000 m² greenhouse, an enormous exhibition space in London's Hyde Park.

When the exhibition closed, it was rebuilt in 1854 in South London’s Sydenham Hill.

One of the world’s most chilling ruins is the Ploutonion at Hierapolis, “the Gates to Hell”.

Here crowds watched priests lead animal sacrifices down into a cave, where they died mysteriously as if dragged down to the underworld. And no one knew how they did it until recently. Hierapolis was a city built on a plateau over the modern Turkish site of Pamukkale, meaning “cotton cliffs”.

This unique landscape was formed as calcium deposits bubbled from thermal springs & formed cliffs of white limestone.

I've been visiting my grandparents over the weekend, and managed to find some of my great-grandfather's photos from when he was stationed in Basra and Mosul during the First World War.

I thought I'd share some of the most interesting ones. My great-grandfather was an animal expert. He used to take care of the horses and bullocks still used to lug weaponry and supplies around.

He was stationed at the Somme but was transferred away to an Indian bullock regiment before the summer offensive, probably saving his life.

I went in search of the ruined 13th century church of St Edmund's in Southwood, Norfolk. It's almost impossible to see from the road if you don't know what you're looking for.

The landscape of the Yare Valley is one of secretive lanes divided by high hedges and wooded coppices.

One of the world’s most incredible ruins is also one of its most mysterious: The ancient Gorgan Wall.

For nearly 1,000 years, this was the longest & mightiest border wall ever built. It was twice as long as Hadrian's Wall, & its construction is an unsolved mystery to this day. Golestan Province in Northern Iran is a unique landscape.

Between the temperate forests of the Alborz Mountains & the shores of the Caspian Sea, a fertile plain stretches for over 200km, forming a narrow corridor between Persia & the wide desert steppes of Central Asia.

The Altai region of Central Asia seems at first to be a remote & peaceful place. But it also sits on the world's busiest flight path for space missions.

Here used-up rockets regularly crash to earth, & local people are left to salvage what they can of the wreckage. The Altai mountain range sits right in the centre of Asia.

This is a rugged landscape that forms a junction between the snow forests of Sibera, the Kazakhstani steppes & the desert plateau of Mongolia.

One of the world's most remarkable ruined places is the sunken city of Thonis-Heracleion.

Once a thriving hub of the ancient world, the city was devastated by a series of environmental disasters, & now lies 6.5km off the coast in the blue waters of the Egyptian sea. The story of its discovery began in 1933, when an RAF pilot flying off the coast of Alexandria reported a strange sight in the water.

He claimed to have seen massive ruined structures below the waves: buildings, squares & streets, a whole city lost beneath the ocean.

I set out into the Norfolk countryside in search of one of the most beautiful & least-visited ruins in England.

I wanted to find the church of St Mary's. Local folklore claims this as the resting place of the Somerton Witch, whose ghost is supposed to haunt its abandoned nave. It was a grey & rainy day. I set out early in the morning, & took a couple of buses out to the coast, into the parish of Martham.

From there, I still had a walk of an hour along country lanes, through the low undulating land of Norfolk.

(this is my "getting-rained-on" face)

One of the most chilling abandoned places in the world is France's Red Zone, or "Zone Rouge".

Over 100 years ago, the First World War so devastated the landscape here that people are still forbidden to enter, & the zone has become a ghostly & overgrown place. As the First World War drew to a close in 1918, Europe had to face the consequences of the most apocalyptic conflict ever seen.

18 million people were dead, while towns & cities lay in ruins. Disease & hunger ravaged the population.

A thread on the creative and beautiful ways that the artists of the past repaired the flaws in torn and damaged manuscripts. Before the spread of paper books in the 13th century, parchment was the standard material.

Parchment was made from animal skin (usually a cow or sheep), scraped into thin layers and dried. It was expensive, and books were a sign of great wealth.

(photo: williamcowley.co.uk/about-us/)

Looking at the architecture of Iran's ruined pigeon towers today. These towers were built to encourage pigeons to roost in them, & deposit their droppings over the side of their little nests.

Once a year, the towers were opened & all the guano was swept out & used as fertiliser.

(goingiran.com/pigeon-tower-y…)

A thread on the "forbidden zone" of Varosha, where one of the world's most popular tourist destinations became a ghost town overnight

https://twitter.com/PaulMMCooper/status/979356442426822657?s=19

A thread on the ruined pigeon towers of Iran, how they mirror sacred architecture & point to a lost tradition of sustainable living.

https://twitter.com/PaulMMCooper/status/980795272279273472?s=19

Ghost towns are rarely abandoned all at once. Whether caused by catastrophe or economic change, the decline is usually slow.

But the strange story of Varosha, Cyprus, shows how one of the world's most popular tourist destinations became an empty, crumbling ruin overnight. Prior to 1974, Varosha was an affluent southern quarter of the Cypriot city of Famagusta.

It was the modern, tourist area of the city, with around 39,000 residents, & the biggest tourist destination in Cyprus.

Around 401 BCE, the Greek writer Xenophon fought a war in Persia. After a defeat, he & his men fled back to Greece across Mesopotamia.

As they were chased across the Tigris River, they came across an incredible sight: the walls of an enormous ruined city, crumbling into the sand The ruins were gigantic, sprawling across a vast area & surrounded by mighty walls more magnificent than anything Xenophon had seen back home.

But no one who lived there knew who had built these enormous walls.

One of the world's weirdest ruined & abandoned places is the Pennsylvanian town of Centralia.

Its residents were forced to leave by an underground fire that's been burning beneath the town for over 50 years. Centralia was once a thriving mining town with five mines digging its rich seam of anthracite coal.

The stock market crash in 1929 closed many of these, but bootleg miners still continued to operate in some of the derelict mines.

A thread-of-threads on fascinating people, revealing artefacts & interesting aspects of history I've stumbled across during my research. A thread on Robert Knox, a C17th English sailor who was shipwrecked in Sri Lanka & held captive there for 20 years.

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