SEVENTY years ago, the Army arrived in a tiny Dorset community carrying orders for the villagers to move out.

Tyneham was being commandeered for use by the Allied forces preparing for D-Day.

Around 250 people were told they would have to leave for the duration of the war.

The last resident to leave, Helen Taylor, posted a note on the church door: “Please treat the church and houses with care.

“We have given up our homes, where many of us have lived for generations, to help win the war and to keep men free.

“We shall return one day and thank you for treating the village kindly.”

Photographs from the time suggested the troops did treat the village well – but the villagers were never to return.

Despite the assurances given at the time of the evacuation, the village was compulsorily purchased after the war and continued to be used as part of the Lulworth ranges.

The fabric of the village decayed as the weather and stray shells took their toll. Only the 13th century church was cared for.

Local historian Rodney Legg launched a campaign on 1967 to have the village returned. Membership topped 2,000 and a petition was taken to Downing Street, to no avail.

In 1968, Tyneham House was destroyed. Mr Legg said years later that its loss had ‘an incredibly demoralising effect on the older people still wanting to return to Tyneham because they realised there was nothing to go back to’.

As the years went by, the Army began working with local groups to allow more access to the site.

On September 6 1975, the Echo was able to report: “The public walked free yesterday over 7,387 of Dorset’s most beautiful wild acres for the first time in 33 years.”

It went on: “But it is a limited freedom. There are no villagers back in the ghost village of Tyneham.”

There were new paths across the ranges, open 154 days a year including all of August.

Brigadier Roy Redgrave, commanding officer of the Royal Armoured Corps Gunnery School, had consulted with 70 amenity and naturalists’ organisations to determine which paths could be opened.

In December that year, the Echo reported the discovery of villagers’ ration books in an old corrugated shed at the back of Tyneham Post Office.

Jane Cato, the only woman warden on the Army range, took them home to clean them up. “They were under a pile of ash on the floor, with rat holes all around,” she said.

“There was surprisingly little of value in the village – most of the villagers must have taken everything they had with them when they left,” she added.

In October 1979, the village church saw its first service in 36 years. The rector of Corfe Castle led the worship and the lesson was read by Brigadier Mark Bond, whose family had owned the village’s 14th century manor house.

The village’s schoolroom was re-opened as the venue for an exhibition in April 1982. Margaret Bond, who had lived in the village from 1892 to 1935, unveiled a plaque there and revisited the tree she had planted in 1911 for the coronation of George V.

In 1985 and 1986, a film crew turned Tyneham into a stand-in for 19th century Tolpuddle in Comrades, a film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

The crew even added a pub, The Magpie.

Fifty years years after the evacuation, Rodney Legg was able to lay a wreath at the door of Tyneham’s church, saying: “This really closes the story. It is suddenly clear that a generation has gone.”

Helen Taylor, then 92, the author of that note on the church door half a century before, said she bore no grudge against the army. “We went with goodwill, thinking we were doing our share to help with the war,” she said.

Although many felt the villagers had been done an injustice, others questioned the romantic view of Tyneham.

In 1995, Fleet Street journalist Patrick Wright published The Village That Died for England. He said of wartime Tyneham: “The village was already almost dead. The school had closed 10 years before because there were no kids. There were hardly any agricultural workers, no shop and the whole place was tumbling down.”

Certainly the school had closed in 1932, by which time it had only nine pupils.

The remaining children were bussed to Corfe Castle. Practically no one in the village owned their own homes; they were tenants instead of the Bond family.

An Echo feature in the 1980s said several former residents had no desire to go back to their village homes with their outside bucket toilets.

Nature in the area had thrived under the army’s custodianship – which might not have happened if the area had been released and turned over to intensive agriculture, it was argued.

By this time the original villagers were diminishing in number.

Photographer Arthur Grant was thought to be the last surviving evacuee from Tyneham when he died, aged 87, in 2010.

His family were given special permission to take his ashes to village, where a coat hook in the schoolroom still bore his name.

His son Geoff said then: “He had never wanted to move back to Tyneham to live and was very pleased with the work the army was doing to preserve what is left.

“But it was his wish to be cremated and have his ashes interred in the churchyard.”