Wasteland 2,44
| wasteland
Owsleybank [2, 44]
Basic Info:
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Wasteland 2,44
Description
An open wasteland, covered in what seems like the pieces of a demolished building. There is for some reason a calm feeling to the area, something which is unusual to find when you are in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.
History
In 1348 AD, when Malton still were nothing but a collection of villages, a wooden church was built on the site. It was dedicated to St. Sley, a local saint of sorts, who was martyred in 1324 when he tried to convince a group of bandits that raiding his home village would make God very, very angry at them. He failed.
St. Sley was never officially canonized by the Catholic Church, but was venerated as if he was in Owsleybank and the nearby vicinity. In 1369, some of the saint's relics were finally discovered in the middle of a distant meadow, where he had been buried in accordance to his last wishes. The remains where, of course, immediately moved to the church and enshrined. Slowly, pilgrims from all over the Maltonian hills began pouring in.
This came to an end several hundred years later. With the English reformation in the 16th century and all the following anti-Catholicism, St. Sley and his church were soon forgotten by most. A small amount of religious citizens still remember their saint, and regular visited the church.
With the dawn of the modern times, this too came to an end. By the late 19th and early 20th century, the church had been abandoned. It held out fairly fine until 1941, when the Germans bombed the city. The church was only lightly damaged, but it was enough. The decay set in, and during the next couple of decades the situation became worse and worse.
In 1968 the church was almost entirely destroyed in a large fire, which erupted for unknown reasons. It also severely damaged surrounding buildings, like the Dawney Building and Dalgliesh Cinema. All of the church's wooden interior and exterior parts were destroyed, leaving only a stone shell. At the same time, St. Sley's relics mysteriously disappeared.
A rumour, which would persist for yeas, was soon spread: It was the saint himself who had started the fire as he could not bear to see the church's decay, and that he had reburied his earthly remains on their original resting place.
The stone ruins remained for over three decades, until when in 2002 the local council decided that it shamed the area's looks, and ordered its destruction. In January 2003, the church was finally gone, plowed down by bulldozers.
A community centre was scheduled to be built on the site, but those plans were naturally soon forgotten when the Malton Incident hit in 2005. Since then, the wasteland has been exactly that.
