There is a village on the coast of Dorset called Tyneham. It has been empty since 1943.
In November of that year, every household got a letter from the War Office. The army needed the land for tank training before D-Day. Two hundred and twenty-five people were told to be gone by the 19th of December. One month.
One of the last to leave pinned a note to the door of St Mary's church. It read:
Please treat the church and houses with care; we have given up our homes where many of us lived for generations to help win the war to keep men free. We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.
They meant it. The same letter promised their homes back when the war was over. It called the sacrifice "no small sacrifice", and said the government was sure they would "give this further help towards winning the war with a good heart".
The war ended. In 1948 the Army placed a compulsory purchase order on the land. Tyneham stayed a firing range. Nobody came back.
The houses fell in. The lanes got used for practice. Only the schoolroom looks as if the children just stepped out, though its last class was actually in 1932.
Then the quiet turn. Because the army kept everyone out, the downs around Tyneham were never farmed and never built on. Ground that was shelled for decades became a haven for wildlife. The thing that took the village also kept it wild.
Since 1975 it has opened to visitors on most weekends and through August. You can walk the street of a place that has been empty for more than eighty years, and read the words left on the church door.
They never got to come back and say thank you. The note is still there, still asking us to be kind to the place.
Sources: Wikipedia, "Tyneham"; BBC Dorset, "Tyneham - Dorset's ghost village" (2008).
Photo: St Mary's church, Tyneham, by Tuuraan78, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.