The Ghost Village You Can Visit Only by Vintage Bus

A Strange Day Out on Salisbury Plain

Picture by Maurice Pullin

Britain has a particular talent for turning the unusual into a day out. A ruined castle becomes a picnic spot. A windswept pier becomes a childhood memory. A village that was emptied during the Second World War becomes, once a year, the destination for a convoy of vintage London buses.

That is the strange appeal of Imberbus, the annual event that carries visitors across Salisbury Plain to the lost village of Imber. This year, the buses return on Saturday 15 August, taking passengers from Warminster to a place that is usually hidden inside a military training area. On that date, access to Imber is only available by the event buses, which makes the journey feel less like ordinary transport and more like an invitation into a story the country half-remembers.

The village itself is not a tourist attraction in the usual sense. There are no normal residents, no high street, no village shop and no everyday life carrying on behind net curtains. Instead, there is a place that was once home to around 150 people, then emptied for wartime training and never given back.

That is what makes Imber so compelling. It is not just a ghost village. It is a village interrupted.

The Village That Did Not Come Back

Imber sits deep inside Salisbury Plain, surrounded by land long used by the military. The settlement itself is old, with records reaching back to Domesday, but the story that defines it now begins in 1943.

Picture by Scott Wylie

On 1 November that year, the villagers were given 47 days’ notice to leave. The area was needed for military training, particularly for American troops preparing for fighting in Europe. Many residents understood the decision as part of the war effort. Some left belongings behind, believing they would be allowed to return once the war was over.

That return never happened.

After the war, Imber remained under military control. In 1961, after public pressure and an inquiry, it was decided that the village would continue to be used for military purposes. The houses did not return to family life. The lanes did not become ordinary lanes again. What had been a temporary wartime sacrifice became permanent.

This is the part of the story that gives Imber its emotional pull. The village was not abandoned because people drifted away, or because work dried up, or because time slowly hollowed it out. It was emptied by instruction. The people left because they were asked to help the war effort, and the place they expected to come back to stayed out of reach.

Why the Bus Makes It Stranger

There is already something unusual about visiting a ghost village. Adding vintage Routemaster buses makes the whole thing feel even more oddly British. Imberbus began in 2009, when bus enthusiasts and transport professionals created a once-a-year service to a place that no longer needed a bus route because nobody lived there.

That is the brilliant contradiction at the heart of the event. For one day, Imber gets a bus service again. Not a modern, practical, everyday one, but a cheerful procession of old and newer Routemasters, guest vehicles, conductors, passengers, route numbers and timetables crossing a military landscape.

The result is part transport rally, part history trip and part national eccentricity. Visitors are not simply driving up, parking and wandering around. They are carried there in a way that feels ceremonial. The bus becomes part of the story, because it restores movement to a place where normal life stopped.

There is something quietly moving about that. The village lost its ordinary routines, but once a year it gets one back. People queue, board, sit upstairs, look out across Salisbury Plain and arrive in a place that exists somewhere between memory and military necessity.

St Giles and the Memory of a Community

The emotional centre of Imber is St Giles’ Church. The thirteenth-century church stands in the village as the most powerful reminder that Imber was once a living community. People were baptised there, married there, buried there and gathered there long before the village became a military training site.

The church is only open on limited days each year, and access depends on the Ministry of Defence allowing the roads to open. That makes every visit feel temporary. You cannot simply decide to go to Imber on a normal weekend and treat it like any other village. The place still belongs to a working military landscape, and visitors are reminded that access can be withdrawn for operational reasons.

That restriction adds to the atmosphere. Imber is not preserved like a museum village, carefully arranged to recreate the past. It is stranger than that. It is partly remembered, partly restricted, partly ruined and partly maintained through the people who keep St Giles open and the story alive.

For visitors, the church gives the day a focus beyond novelty. The buses may get people there, but St Giles explains why the journey matters.

More Than a Quirky Day Trip

It would be easy to treat Imberbus as just another odd British event, and there is plenty of fun in it. There are vintage buses, enthusiasts, temporary timetables, village halls, refreshments and the pleasing absurdity of London buses rumbling through the open Wiltshire landscape.

But Imber is not only quirky. It is also a reminder that landscapes hold decisions. Fields, roads and empty buildings can carry the consequences of war, planning and state power long after the people directly affected have gone.

The villagers of Imber were not the only community to lose homes or land to wartime need, and the wider story of military training in Britain is complicated. Defence requires space, and Salisbury Plain remains one of the country’s most important training areas. Yet that does not make the human side of the story disappear.

Imber asks a simple question in a quiet way: what happens when a temporary emergency becomes a permanent absence?

That question is why the village continues to fascinate people. It is not spooky in the cheap sense. It is haunting because it is real.

The Appeal of Lost Places

Part of Imber’s appeal is that people are drawn to places where ordinary life has stopped. A school without children, a pub without drinkers, a street without front doors being opened each morning. These places make the past feel unusually close because they show the shape of life without the life itself.

Most villages change slowly. Shops close, families move, buildings are altered, and the past gets layered over by the present. Imber is different. Its everyday story was cut short. That makes the imagination work harder. Visitors do not just see what is there. They think about what should have been there.

That is why the vintage bus journey works so well. It softens the sadness without erasing it. The event brings people, noise and movement back to the village, but only briefly. Then the buses leave, the road closes again, and Imber returns to its unusual silence.

For one day, the lost village feels almost connected to the world again.

A Peculiar British Pilgrimage

The best strange days out are rarely strange for one reason only. Imberbus works because it combines several very British ingredients: wartime history, restricted land, an empty village, a medieval church, transport enthusiasm, countryside, volunteers and a bus route that should not really exist.

That mixture could easily feel gimmicky, but it does not. The event has become popular because it gives people a way to experience history without turning it into something heavy or distant. A visitor can enjoy the buses, the view and the oddness of the day, while still sensing the deeper story underneath.

There is no need to overstate the mystery. Imber is not hidden by conspiracy. It is not a secret ruin. It is a real village, in a real military training area, with a real history of people who left and did not return. The unusual part is that, once a year, the public can reach it by one of the most cheerful forms of transport imaginable.

That contrast is what makes it memorable. A ghost village should perhaps be approached in silence. Imber is approached on a Routemaster.

The Village at the End of the Route

On paper, Imberbus is a heritage bus event. In practice, it is something more peculiar and more thoughtful. It takes a vehicle associated with city streets, commuters, school trips and everyday public life, then sends it across Salisbury Plain to a village where everyday public life ended more than eighty years ago.

That is why the journey matters as much as the destination. The bus is not just a way to get there. It is a temporary bridge between the ordinary world and a place that history placed behind a barrier.

For a few hours, Imber is reachable again. People arrive, walk carefully, visit the church, take photographs, drink tea, talk about the past and try to imagine the village as it was. Then the day ends, the buses head back to Warminster, and the village becomes quiet once more.

There are stranger days out in Britain, but few are quite so oddly moving. Imberbus is funny, nostalgic, eccentric and faintly sad all at once.

A lost village gets a bus service for the day.

And somehow, that feels like exactly the right way to visit it.