Going to work for me involves crossing a dam that makes up one end of a large, artificial lake. The dam was built nearly 150 years ago, during the Victorian era in Britain, to create a large reservoir. It is considered a masterpiece of engineering and is a major tourist attraction in the area. Over the last few months my commute to work has also become an exercise in tracking the falling water level in the reservoir. As weeks have gone by without much rainfall and temperature records were broken, the level has fallen lower and lower. The retreating water literally brought a new tourist attraction to light: the remains of an old village which was flooded together with the rest of the valley when the dam was built. Though the remains of the village are nowhere near as dramatic as rumours have it – a few crumbling walls, roads and bridges are all there is to be seen – there is still a powerful sense of haunting to these ruins.

When the dam was built it was to provide clean and safe drinking water to growing urban populations in England. The valley and the village, on the other hand, were situated in rural Wales. While both Wales and England are part of Britain, this does not imply equality, neither then nor now. The same colonial policies that devastated lives overseas were applied internally, too, and many voices were routinely silenced. The villagers were never asked their opinion. Together with the bones of their ancestors they were forcibly relocated to a new location beyond the dam.

In many respects, the Welsh villagers were lucky compared to those subjected to colonial practices overseas: they were provided with new homes that are still in possession of their descendants; they could remain nearby, and many obtained permanent paid jobs with the water company that had drowned their valley. Nevertheless, trauma and bitterness can still be felt in the area, even now, so many years later. Maybe this is in part because this was not the only case of its kind, the last of which occurred in the 1960s.

When the dam was built, and to this day, there are competing stories of what it represents. Progress; beauty; improvement in health and sanitation; human ingenuity and hard labour wresting resources from a hostile land. Colonialism; oppression and exploitation; nationalism (both here and there). While the diverse and varying stories are all acknowledged to some degree it is easy to get the sense that this was so long ago and that we should let bygones be bygone. Much water has literally flowed over the dam since then. But what happens when stories like these suddenly re-emerge from the depths? While the drowned village has become another tourist magnet it is maybe also igniting a renewed interest in the stories that came before. A local storyteller is tracing family lines, documents of births and deaths. Someone else is looking at maps tracking property lines and tenancies of what is now the bottom of a lake. There are pictures showing streets, and stories of the shrewd female owner of the village pub. Snapshots of village life on the cusp of destruction. Going further back, what other drowned voices, both human and otherwise, would we find and what could we learn if we allowed these voices to speak?

The story of the lake and the image of the remains of a road brings up the image of another lake with another road disappearing into water. In Denmark, a country so flat that its highest point is the top of a bridge, the march of progress at times took an opposite form to the one in Wales. Here, it was not a question of retaining water but getting rid of it. Sometimes land was reclaimed from the sea and sometimes lakes were drained to create new areas where food could be grown. In the last 20 to 30 years some of these formerly drained lakes have been allowed to flood again, shimmering water replacing agricultural fields that had long since ceased to be economically viable. In this case the rise of the water has silenced the voice of progress, at least for now. With the water, other voices have returned: the songs of birds that had not been heard for decades, some settling down, some only passing through. Seemingly out of nowhere otters have found the new bodies of water and made them their home.

Meanwhile, the media bring me images of a whole country nearly submerged; millions of people whose homes have been washed away, so many people drowned, so many lives torn apart. Individual voices and tragedies are condensed into headlines and numbers and a few striking images. Soon even those will disappear as other stories take over, demand our attention.

Looking at climate predictions, it seems clear that both rising and falling water levels will be speaking ever more loudly in the years to come, together with the language of fire, the language of wind, the language of so many things, so many beings, so many peoples we thought we could suppress or ignore. Looking out at the lake from the Victorian dam, I wonder what voices we will allow to speak, what stories we will tell and be willing to hear as water comes and goes and the landscapes we have grown up with transmute. Will we have the courage to listen and bear witness and let our ideas of progress and ownership, of belonging and wisdom, transmute with the land?