Dunwich is enchanted England

It’s a mournful refrain among the English that all the fairies have left these islands. Some say you can only sense them at the Celtic fringes; that the industrial England of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and his ilk so brutally uprooted their webs of myth and mystery that enchantment simply isn’t to be found in mainland Britain any more. I don’t think this is true. Yes, the fairies are harder to see. But if you’re paying attention, even industrial, tarmac-ribboned, electrified modern England still has plenty of “thin places”: spots where the air is different, and the uncanny is just at the edge of awareness. Dunwich, on England’s Suffolk coast, is one of these places. But now it is in cinders after a four-day blaze. Amid this summer’s arid, weeks-long drought and successive heatwaves, all of En