The Haunted Village: The Local Has Become a Ghost in Its Own Home

An edited excerpt from The Great Flattening: How Everything Is Being Taken, a forthcoming book by Colin Todhunter on enclosure, place and autonomy.

In the Cornish coastal village of Polperro during the first half of the 20th century, the smell of the harbour was inescapable. It carried fish in various states of decay and preparation.

The smell moved through alleys, up stone steps and into doorways. It mixed with rope, wet timber and the residue of labour embedded in the quay’s very surfaces.

As photogenic as the harbour might have been at the time, it was a gritty point of contact between sea and settlement. Here, catching, gutting, mending and selling occurred in a place that was visible to everyone. Life was hard and the risks were immediate. A shift in the wind or a poor catch had consequences that could not be deferred.

Today, if you visit the village (and others like it), the walls, the slips and the narrow streets remain, but the activities and sensory range have narrowed. What remains is carefully managed for mass tourism.

Aside from the usual trappings associated with the tourist economy, we can see this in belief systems. In Polperro, the transition from a genuine belief in piskies (pixies) to their current status as shiny souvenirs and fridge magnets follows the village’s shift from a self-contained working society to a place reshaped for outsiders.

In the 1700s and 1800s, piskies were a practical reality. Local people didn’t see them as magical icons. They were earthy, weathered beings that explained why a boat might fail or why a path home became suddenly confusing in the dark. They represented the danger and randomness of a life lived on the edge of the sea.

To a fisherman in 1850, a piskie was a way to personify the uncertain forces that could ruin a life’s work in a single night. This fear was functional because it kept the community tied to the rhythm of daily life and the harsh reality of the coast.

Gradually, however, the piskie was stripped of its teeth. As artists and travellers arrived in the late 19th century, they turned a serious local truth into a curious bit of folklore for entertainment. Once the daily pressure of working the harbour vanished, the original purpose of the piskie went with it. The figure was rebuilt as a smiling plastic item sold to people who have no connection to the village’s difficult past.

This transformation follows a sequence we see across the globe. First comes the outside attention: painters, actors, writers and travellers arrive and recast the notion of the village in terms of its ‘character’ and continuity or ‘tradition’.  The village begins to be understood by how it appears to those arriving from outside, rather than how it functions for those within.

Eventually, the economy turns outwards entirely. Income becomes tied to external demand, which fluctuates according to fashion rather than local production. This is a form of enclosure without physical barriers. Exclusion is shaped through affordability (expensive restaurants and hotels) and systems of allocation (fewer locals and more holiday lets).

As housing shifts into intermittent occupation or short-term rentals, the village is no longer structured around the people who maintained its daily continuity. Streets that were once lived-in year-round become partially empty outside peak seasons. The village persists as a form, but its internal logic is now produced elsewhere.

This is not a uniquely Cornish phenomenon. From the Scottish Highlands to the Welsh coast and the Yorkshire moors, we are witnessing a ‘flattening’. Different villages, shaped by vastly different histories of work, are beginning to converge. Agricultural, industrial and coastal histories become secondary to a shared requirement of what it means to be a ‘village’ in a globalised world where the ‘local’ has been displaced.

Enclosure operates through replacement of function, and ‘flattening’ (homogenisation) operates through repetition of what remains visible after that replacement. The gentrified village remains open (if you can afford to stay), but its use is determined by the needs of private capital located elsewhere and the digital platforms that manage a transient population.

Polperro’s streets still follow their ancient lines. The visual form remains strong. But the connection between these forms and the activities that shaped them has weakened. It is now possible to stay in the village without ever touching the systems that sustained it.

The quay is relatively quiet and the environment is curated. The ‘local’ has become a ghost in its own home.

Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. His open access books on the global food system can be accessed via Figshare (no sign in or sign up required).

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