The Haunted Village: The Local Has Become a Ghost in Its Own Home
Colin Todhunter
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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The 2019 Mark Jenkin film “Bait” goes well with this article.
The almost forgotten people Trump murdered off the coast of Venezuela.
“The 57 confirmed bombings of boats that the Trump administration has carried out so far since last September have shattered families and communities across Latin America, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Southern Command never acknowledging the identities of the at least 192 people they’ve killed”
Names of Some US Boat Strike Victims Revealed – Consortium News
A secret man made bunker/base spotted in Utah on the side of a mountain
matrixbot (@thematrixb0t): “I knew it Utah. You have a lot of secrets.” | nitter.poast.org
The American taxpayer took a big hit here.
matrixbot (@thematrixb0t): “How is this even possible?” | nitter.poast.org
A strong case could be made that it was the Industrial Revolution,the rise of capitalist market economy together with the bourgeois liberal state that had the more to do with turning traditional village life outward than bevvies of bemused bohemians…
Many outlets reporting the link between weak face to face relationships and declining births rates, that are linked to smart phone use – I’d even go as far as to say that the rising cases of mental health are also down to the overuse of blue screen devices – such as tablets laptops and smart phones.
The PTB want the population of the planet greatly reduced, they are poisoning our foods the water the skies etc, and now blue screen devices are reducing fertility rates.
Well, men keeping their phones in their front trouser pockets probably ARE reducing fertility. Increases cancer for sure.
Agreed.
Paralyzing shock and the most bitter sorrow for all animal welfare fanatics: “Timmy” the whale has beached itself on the coast of the Danish island of Anholt in the Kattegat and died there. Instead of crossing the North Sea toward the Arctic, he must have swum about 100 miles back past the island of Læsø toward the Baltic Sea and gotten “lost” again.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/16/europe/timmy-stranded-whale-dead-intl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anholt_(Denmark)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A6s%C3%B8
Now the poor animal has finally found its temporary resting place, as it is in danger of exploding from the buildup of decomposition gases, after flocks of hungry seagulls have already torn through its thick layer of blubber with their merciless beaks. $2M were therefore quite literally set in the sand through this “rescue.”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/in_den_Sand_setzen
But the sensationalist press (especially BILD, colloquially known as “BLÖD,” meaning “stupid”) was undoubtedly able to significantly boost its circulation (including clicks, ad revenue, etc.) thanks to the conservation craze of Germany’s self-righteous do-gooder public through its coverage. https://archive.ph/UavAE
The Danes had already made it clear in advance that they would make no effort to rescue the whale if it beached again, as they considered it a “natural occurrence.” Now no one wants to take the blame, and—just as expected—everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else. https://archive.is/KELoD
Given the compelling reason at hand, we are therefore broadcasting the “Whale Symphony” today in memory of our animal companions who have suffered and perished due to human fault and arrogance, instead of our usual program; for whales, too, are God’s creatures. Regardless of whether Jews even consider non-Jews to be human beings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgESUPnCQ5o
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_God_Created_Great_Whales
In recent years, media and political commentary has been dominated by a seemingly relentless cascade of doomsday scenarios. Anyone following the news got the impression that humanity was on the brink of an ecological collapse.
Yet, an unexpected U-turn has just emerged —one that is, however, largely being met with a wall of silence in the mainstream media https://archive.is/BDyP2.
The IPCC has quietly walked back its most extreme projections. While this should actually offer a sensational sense of relief to the global community, a telling silence prevails across politics and the press. https://thedragonsbreath.substack.com/p/the-ipcc-falls-apart
The orange Zion-Don, too, is desperately seizing on this news as a welcome distraction from his “activities” that are destroying world peace and the global economy.
https://nypost.com/2026/05/17/us-news/trump-celebrates-after-un-climate-committee-moves-away-from-its-most-extreme-global-warming-scenario/
https://www.globalresearch.ca/polls-u-s-is-the-greatest-threat-to-peace-in-the-world-today/5603342
The real scandal, however, lies not in the scientific miscalculation itself, but in the far-reaching political consequences drawn from it. Based on these now-discarded horror scenarios, a profound transformation of the economy and society was set in motion:
– The introduction of the CO2 tax and the ban on internal combustion engines strip Germany’s key industry of its foundation, jeopardizing hundreds of thousands of jobs.
– The premature shutdown of coal-fired power plants has driven electricity and heating costs sky-high, severely undermining Germany’s international competitiveness.
– Whether it is excessive home insulation that leads to mold growth, the visual destruction of natural landscapes by “wind turbine deserts,” or the legal approval of powdered insects in food—no area of life remains untouched by climate-policy paternalism.
As well-known, Danes are a people with long history of whaling. Now, an elderly islander has dared to climb “the Death from Lübeck,” as he irreverently calls Timmy. What good that’s supposed to do is clear only to him, but it greatly offends all compassionate, mourning Germans who casually stroll past their compatriots begging for coins in the pedestrian zones every day, or who are raped and murdered by Oriental and African invaders. But dragging their a giant, decaying mascot through the mud is a crime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEsiKl11Dso
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8QgnjFwJ9Q
This Danish woman says in German that the huge whale carcass is polluting the water at her beloved beach, where she goes swimming every morning. She blames the idiotic Germans who caused this and even wasted money on it. She calls Timmy a fish like any other, without realizing that whales aren’t fish but mammals, just like she (supposedly) is. Activate available audiotrack (Wal is identified by AI as Wahl, which means election).
Historical footage of what happened when somebody thought that the best way to get rid of a decaying 8 ton sperm was to blow it up…..
https://youtu.be/Na_zKbN2VJw?si=ri3MleU5FEUGH8_h
Its a lesson in unintended consequences.
Consider any farming village in Britain. In 1926 nearly the whole population was associated in some way with agriculture, and except for a few toffs those who weren’t farm workers supported them in some way – running the pub or the village shop, carriers, the postman, etc.
The last 100 years changed all that. Farm workers were replaced wholesale with machines. They perforce moved to the cities and the dwellings they left empty were colonised by urban escapees.
What would Mr Todhunter have? Deindustrialisation and the subsequent immiseration of the population at large?
It’s no good lamenting this process. Technology made it inevitable, and frankly the lives of those farm labourers, fishermen and their families were so gruelling as in many cases to be execrable.
That argument is a classic construct designed to make corporate dominance look like the only rational choice. The destruction of the British village in the 20th century wasn’t an unavoidable byproduct of technological triumph; it was a deliberate, politically engineered policy.
To suggest that the only alternative is immiseration is a dishonest false dichotomy. The alternative is simple: break up land monopolies and implement decentralised, ecological farming and food systems that serve local communities instead of billionaires and giant agribusiness. That’s how you get healthy food instead of a public health crisis; that’s how you create meaningful employment.
By eliminating parasitic corporate agribusiness and supermarkets that pocket the vast majority of food expenditures, we can ensure decent wages for farmers and farmworkers without inflating grocery prices for everyday people.
https://off-guardian.org/2026/01/06/stolen-soil-and-corporate-welfare-the-global-scam-of-feeding-the-world/
The US taxpayer screwed again – where is all the US taxpayers cash going to.
“The Florida Division of Emergency Management, the agency in charge of the center, just last week told state officials that they’d spent an additional $45 million to cover expenses incurred since the lockup began.
Roughly $13 million of that is going to GEO-CDR Baker and Lemoine CDR, two contractors responsible for creating the center, and nearly $400,000 to Taser International, according to state spending records.
This brings the total spent on “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Deportation Depot” — Florida’s other state-run detention center — to at least $460 million. The highest bill — $92 million — went to Doodie Calls, a portable toilet and sanitation company.
But the final price tag is expected to be much higher: Previously reported records revealed that DEM spent $370 million on Alligator Alcatraz alone in just its first three months of operation, while burning more than $1 million per day.
DeSantis on ‘Alligator Alcatraz’: ‘We’ve saved taxpayers money’ | WLRN
Trump is definitely a madman.
Canada Goose https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/17.0.2/svg/1f1e8-1f1e6.svg (@CanadaGoose911): “Seriously what kind of deranged shit is this?” | nitter.poast.org
Artists, painters, actors & writers are the shock troops of the war on these communities – the vanguard of the gentrification forces.
Its all going to hell in a hand basket.
“For the second year running, the National Audit Office has been unable to sign off the UK’s Whole of Government Accounts.
The auditor could not form an opinion on whether the figures were free from material misstatement.
This has only happened twice in the WGA’s entire history. Both times in the last two years.
The reason for this is local audit. Just 1% of councils and other local bodies published audited accounts on time for 2022/23. By the time the NAO went to compile the Whole of Government Accounts, only 10% of English councils had submitted reliable data. For 2023/24 that fell to 4%. £73 billion of public sector spending in the latest WGA sits unaudited. Net debt and net income are out by tens of billions.
The Chair of the Public Accounts Committee called the UK public finances “virtually a closed book.” You have to ask yourself how bad the real picture is.
This is not a technical accounting story. The state has lost the ability to verify its own books, at the moment that verification matters most.
The OBR forecasts against data the auditor cannot verify. The Treasury sets fiscal rules against it. Gilt markets price sovereign risk against it.
We argue about headroom. We argue about debt sustainability. We argue about tax envelopes. The numbers underneath those arguments aren’t even signed off. The auditor general has said so. Twice.
How bad are the public finances?
We don’t know. The OBR doesn’t know. The Treasury doesn’t know. The people sitting in Number 11 don’t know.”
Theme Park Britain has been transforming the Country bit by bit for 40 years or more. Coastal came first as Fish stocks declined and Fishing practices changed, out went the small family owned Boats to make way for bigger operators as did Fishing Rights, sold off to the highest bidder. Rural villages made a very close second as Farming practices changed too. Villages in the Lakes and Dale’s are now majorly populated by those who can afford those quaint Stone built Cottages and Barn conversions. Iirc that many Barns were repurposed to Housing during the 80s, it was claimed by some to have negatively affected Barn Owl populations. Lastly came the romanticising of the post Industrial landscape with an explosion of themed, sanitised “Visitor’s centres”. School trips and family outings to see how Coal was mined, Cotton or Wool spun and woven, Iron and Steel and Pottery made. All with the obligatory Cafe and Gift shop attached and staffed by either Volunteers or the lucky few on minimum wages.
Excellent assessment; but missing in the evolution is the initial eradication or removal of the original ingenous locals ( later to be romanticized for tourists). Then we have the new locals who create a working local economy which then succumbs to the process described by Colin. Such has a been the fate of the place now called Port Townsend. Mixed in with that loss of place-based spirit, heart and soul is not just tourism but also military domination and environmental degradation.
The locals I really care about are the non human ones; the ones that were there in the beginning and the ones that are struggling to survive.
The Deserted Village – Wikipedia
This scenario is similar to the checkered history of Woodstock, NY. Originally it was an obscure village supported by subsistence farming, timber cutting, leather tanning, and quarrying. In the early 20th Century, a few wealthy art patrons thought its unspoiled, verdant Catskill Mountains climate was an ideal location for an artist’s colony.
The first influx of artists and art-related institutions and enterprises gave the village more exposure, but the art-colony contingent more or less successfully grafted onto the existing culture– even before the art-colony promotion, Woodstock had its own local artists and artisans.
The same “discovery” process repeated in the early 1960s, again driven by wealthy outsiders. Remember Albert Grossman? Of course, almost coincidentally, the chaotically-organized “Woodstock Music and Art Fair”, aka “Woodstock Festival”, increased the exposure and attraction to the area by orders of magnitude.
Thus accelerated the transmogrification of Woodstock into a countercultural tourist trap. 😠
Are you from NY? I’m an NYC gal myself. My folks did the obligatory Woodstock thing back in the sixties. I think “countercultural tourist trap” is a wonderful expression.
Close– I’m from PA (Philadelphia).
I don’t remember the exact quote, but a long-time Woodstock resident once summed up the changes by rhetorically asking “Why do I have a choice of eighteen shops selling exotic loose leaf tea, but I can’t find a store that sells a replacement valve for my furnace?” 🤔
This makes me think that people in the modern world, the TV and screens world, are viewers rather than participants. TV delivered Plato’s Cave allegory into every home to have the master’s shadow play, dosing us daily. Before movies required us to go out into public spaces and participate to some degree in society. But movies set the stage for “watching”, “viewing” and instant “tourism”. Tourism was a luxury activity of wealth. And it is largely a viewing process. A lounge voyeurism. As TV came on, this activity was accessed daily to anyone who could afford a TV. An egalitarian lounge luxury. As wages and jobs boomed to fill post WW2 capitalist expansion in the US, social equality afforded each family daily TV tourism. Digital devices brought individual voyeristic isolation and alienation. Meanwhile, the permanent tourists in the contemporary world, the 1%, who only see the world thru the lens of their personally customized utopias, expect this to be the only way to live and project this false reality onto all the screens we see daily.
Artists craft modest ideal betters out of meager, sometimes neglected potentials, like in low cost, low income urban neighborhoods. Artists are usually a low income class. (I can vouch for this.) Some artists who are connected to wealth, tow in the opportunist exploitation of the developer capitalist class. Or they just see the better and jump in with their limitless cash. Making things better should be a local collective matter. But the privatization, financialization and centralization of American society has hosed up everything for themselves, without concern for others. The digital cave captured public have forgotten how to participate in reality to make things better. They sit and WATCH their world being burned to the ground by the 1%. All the traditional and functional physical modes of making a life are trashed before they can be made better, collectively by and for all.
We can no longer allow a tiny class of society to hold all collective wealth and authority in order to craft their own personal Utopias built upon the bottom 90%’s disenfranchised serfdom. The vehicle to this end is illusion, the cure is a return to physical reality.
You might be interested in Guy Debord’s book “The Society if the Spectacle”
Thanks Eleanor. I know all about the Situationists which i started reading near 2000. Society of the Spectacle should be on everyone’s book shelf as a must read to understand contemporary “civilization”. I would recommend along side, Plato’s “Republic” (esp. Allegory of the Cave) and Marshall McLuhan’s “Gutenberg Galaxy”.+ “Understanding Media”. McLuhan’s two books written one after the other in the 1950’s, documents the evolution of mass media, that started with mechanically printed material, into a vehicle that centralized the source and content of all information, affecting the knowledge and behavior of modern humanity.
“This is a form of enclosure without physical barriers.”
In other words, LOCKDOWN.
Thank you Colin for your continuing flow of insightful perceptions that is helping humanity clearly define the shape of the cages being built around us by the PTB. It is my belief that if we can accurately delineate the paradigms they are deploying, so that anyone can identify these traps, even before they are deployed, individuals and groups can effectively counter them out of existence at point of deployment.
“It is now possible to stay in the village without ever touching the systems that sustained it.” “…the environment is curated”
The PTB have discovered that image, depiction, is more powerful than reality. Once a working class fishing village, now a quaint painting from a bourgeois weekend holiday. Images set the tone that rings “Utopia” in the mind of the viewer. An escape from the daily reality of incrementally being priced out of existence. Contemporarily, the “mind of the viewer” is the only reality that exists. The image of a reality, which has been perfected by artists, by TV, by gentrification, by storytelling, by propaganda, has been coopted and cast out as bait and trap all in one. Most are held captive by this perpetual state of illusion that has replaced the daily physical reality of war, poverty, inequality, and imminent doom.
Belief that their magical fairy tale hour shadow play can just keeping pumping out blue pill sedation, is the real root illusion. One that is finally crumbling to dust.
Next?
Wonderful piece. I think the stripping away of the numinous is a deliberate policy decision. The controllers have no spirituality, beyond perhaps some kind of satanism. They in fact loathe and fear the spiritual aspect of this life and want to destroy it.
Cafes, as far as the eye can see,
It’s a middle class thing.
Cashed up ‘successful’, bored, thrill seekers, trying to escape from their tedious, pressure cooker careers, by buying coastal properties.
Pending.
It was put in trash by our friend Akismet. I saved it from false accusation.
Incontrovertible evidence that the media is really taking the piss now:
(From the Daily Shite)
Now what goes through your mind when you read that? Is everyone getting up to shout: “Fuck off with your global climate scare crap, David!”
Not a bit of it:
For fuck’s sake! Fucking tits? Fucking caterpillars?
And that sound you hear is the BBC blowing a huge raspberry. Perhaps even a climate altering raspberry!
“Quick, look over there!”
It’s more like: Yeah we know what the real problem is but we’ll twist it into something totally twee whilst we have a good laugh as well.
What you’ve got to remember about Attenborough, is that by having an animal act he was on the lowest rung of showbiz. Scaring little children about the world ending is getting back at his more talented brother.
The grim process described by Colin can be seen in all coastal and rural villages, county towns and well, everywhere. There is no part of the UK that has not been degraded by industrialisation. It’s not just the physical landscape though; generations of industrial “development” have changed the way people think about the world. I call this process the “urbanisation of thought”.
As centres of power, politics, media, banking and law are all urban, this power has reached into rural areas and corrupted and degraded the communities that formerly lived a reasonably good life in these places.
It is not uncommon now for a “farmer” producing industrial/chemical cash crops to get his own food from the local supermarket. Most rural areas are now partly populated by people who have no involvement in agriculture whatsoever, likewise “fishing” villages.
I work in organic farming in Sussex and there are few authentic country folk around these days, industrial “development” has removed the jobs that “we” formerly did in the countryside and I now describe this area as “sub-rural”. Of course land ownership is the big issue. Here in Sussex there are huge “estates” that have been held by the same family since the land was stolen in 1066.. so not much hope of reform there.
I live in a village that used to have factories that sewed Civil War uniforms, a dairy, a car dealership, a cement factory, feed and grain stores, 3 churches, 3 hotels, and other stuff I don’t even know about. Now, it’s just a row of houses along a through-route. No tourists. No quaintness. No souvenirs. Nothing like that. The car, just the car, destroyed it. You can drive seven miles to the store or work or church. The car turned it into a few houses and that’s all.
What did you have before, horses and donkeys?
Fuck you.
Goats! There it was. Yes, your were riding goats.
10/10
Exact same story in Ireland’s west and other coastal villages. The populations were much greater in number 200 years ago than today and nobody is left who could say how the people lived there
Nothing of the original culture remains it has all been replaced by government department store fronts, medical, educational, welfare or tourism for the most part is all that happens there now.
The past 200 years was thick with rembrances
200 from now should there be, will have nothing to share but the certainty of the enforced ideology.
200 years from now it should be a much better place. The systemic decline due to corrupt governance will not continue for much longer. That system is in it’s death throes as evidenced by their desperate attempts to maintain power with megalomaniacal schemes and technological devices
Air B&B has ruined many a beautiful place – in Scotland tourism is welcome but it can in some instances be overwhelming to an area.
Also in the Scottish colony over one million English people have moved to Scotland – mainly older English folk looking for more bang for their buck North of the border – their presence changes old villages from the inside out – young folk can’t get a social house – or there’s very few if any available properties to buy.
Ditto aUStralia.
Property investors are future raping the young.
“Wherever you go, there you are.” – Buckaroo Banzai. Except for those unique places which will be purged of regular folks for the exclusive enjoyment of a few, self-chosen, wealthy, Which is scary because, as anyone who has spent any time around them will know “rich people have no taste” (from a gallery owner I knew who would curate, for a stiff fee, the homes of the wealthy).
Yeah man.Where has it all gone.Do we only have it for a decade ? Is that what a decade is ? Shite x
the same thing has been happening to our villages in greece. mass tourism has been invading relentlessly. our own village, where we live year round and have til now avoided being directly contaminated by tourism, has still been eroding in recent years from the corrosive flood of fakeness that ever year seems to be lapping a bit higher up the mountainside and is now splashing our toes. there still isnt an ‘airbnb’ in our village but the next village down the mountain has been inundated with them, as the old timers die their heirs dont move back from the city, but turn the house into yet another cookie cutter tourist accomodation. in our own village we’re still second or third cousins with almost everyone we see day to day, but you can see it pulling apart. the younger generation has already lost most of the foothold by moving away for jobs etc, and even half the folks who live here still, work in town or down the mountain in some tourism related venue and have gotten hooked on that flow of money.
of course the government etc dont help at all- theyve decided that they dont want any other way of life _except_ tourism and actively make it almost impossible to live from the land like we used to.
Love of money is the root of all evil. Will the tourists stay home when Greece is totally tokenized, probably not.