Fearing Island had once been a desolate patch of sand dunes and scrubgrass.

Far from the electric lights of 1900's London, Devonshire was a desolate patch of land almost entirely surrounded by the sea.

Historians had believed that little remained of the burial ground, which covered what was then a desolate five-acre patch on the outskirts of New York.

The green had become a desolate patch of pockmarked mud.

Livermore drew on a single, robust design that, before the testing moratorium, was detonated in the 1980s under a desolate patch of Nevada desert.

In little patches bare and desolate she called up like a flame the golden crocus, or its purple brother like an emperor's ghost.

The refugees' are unlikely to begin landing before tomorrow, with frantic preparations to construct crude shelters on a desolate patch of wasteland still far from complete.

During the cold war, they checked a new weapon design by conducting a half dozen or so large test explosions under a desolate patch of Nevada desert.

By the next morning, five had died from exposure and three more were in a bad state when the raft made landfall on a desolate patch of coastline.

In the tiny desolate patch of the city, surrounded by the ghosts of industry, the pall of nightmare energy seemed to lift for a few hours.