An article penned in September 1978 by “A Bystander” who visited Imber on the occasion of the annual Holy Communion and Evensong services at St. Giles” Church. The services were conducted by the Rev. Ralph Dudley, Vicar of Imber:
There is a point on the Imber road, half a mile or so beyond the new tank hangars where the track climbs up beside a copse to a ridge and seems to stop, as if the ground beyond it has caved in and left a precipice.
From that summit you can look down into the wide rush-coloured valley and see the same road snaking down, and pretend you are in Africa or have survived a dreadful catastrophe, because the ranges are like a wasteland, the last sort of place on earth where on a Saturday morning you would expect to find a string quartet playing or an old woman decorating a grave with red dahlias.
We slipped along the dusty road between Summer Down and Southdown Sleight along the avenue of dead tanks until we reached a pocket of trees. It was as if, as suddenly as we had found ourselves drifting into a sinister, ruined country, we had come upon a neglected Surrey lane where no-one cleared the dead wood out of the hedgerows or fed the birds.
The first building we passed was set back behind a wall and high gates on the crown of a right-hand bend. There was a worm of barbed wire across the drive. As we went by two men vaulted over the gate like burglars.
St. Giles’ Church was plugged in like a sick patient in a hospital ward. There were cables trailing out of it down the hill to a mobile generator and hot lamps burning in the chancel. We walked through the porch past a huddle of film technicians and found seats near the back. We looked at the walls which were the colour of weathered skin and at the sweltering congregation, all of whom like us must have come across the gloomy tundra and seen the smoke from the stubble fires hanging on the skyline.
We listened to the string quartet playing while the churchmen and the clergy were gathering and making ready for the communion service and felt we did not belong and ought not to stay.
And so we went outside into the sunshine and prowled around among the graves. We saw three people tending three family plots, an older and a younger woman dressed in blue and a man in brown. The women were arranging flowers while the man clipped back the grass with long-handled shears.
There were small artificial wreaths lying beside the stones as well, and one of the women told me how each Christmas another member of their family would drive to Imber and if he could not reach the church by the road he would crawl in through a badger-run to replace the plastic flowers and make sure that everything was in order.
Three-quarters of an hour later the singing stopped and the church doors opened. When the people filed out they were faced by a man carrying a film camera on his shoulder and pointing it at them like a rocket-launcher. Another outsider wearing headphones and carrying a huge bazooka of a microphone crept and cringed among them as they began to find their friends and welcome each other home.
Someone showed us an album of photographs of the village as it used to be – secluded, picturesque, apparently content to do without mains water, electricity, gas and all the rest of the hardware of the modern world, which in such curious circumstances comes down among.
First we circled the gunmen’s coverts, a row of concrete block-houses built in the Belfast-Beirut style without roofs, window-frames or front doors so that soldiers can get to grips with the crudities of modern warfare, and we noticed, in comparison with everything else still standing in Imber, how sturdily they were made. Which will be Imber’s last monument, I wonder, St. Giles’ or O’Connor’s the butchers who never sold a sausage?
And then we set off up the Heytesbury road, all the way back to the vedette post we saw nothing but a single coaster steaming upstream to the deserted docklands.