Ten km or so south east of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, on Highway 39 , the community of Ralph consists merely of a cluster of four or five houses, a repair shop, a single road sign and two Canadian National Railway signposts.

All around Ralph stretch the prairies and the vast blue sky. Nodding donkeys leisurely, almost excruciatingly slowly, pump oil from far beneath the surrounding fields. Grass rustles dryly between the highway and the railway track. It isn't a particularly interesting or scenic place.

It just is.

Ralph.

Lenore takes photographs of me leaning on "my" signposts. We head to Weyburn to camp.

Ralph was once a proper place.

It was named, according to a local, after a CNR section-man. In the Rusty Relics Museum in Carlyle, I found a copy of Cummins' 1922 Saskatchewan Railway Guide's map.

The map appears to indicate that Ralph had a station. There was probably once a grain silo by the railway, and the associated businesses that create a village. Then the farms expanded, and the place was levelled to become just fields like any others on the Prairie.

At least Ralph still exists, sort of, unlike Garwood, which is a dot on the 1922 map between Ralph and Weyburn.

Garwood has vanished without trace. A grass-covered embankment south of the present railway line suggests that the track was once doubled here, but that is all.

The Canadian equivalent of the medieval deserted villages that are common in the UK?