Looking for people who have experience living in the English countryside

Maiah said:

More specifically, people who have information to share about living in the English countryside in modern times, like now.

How do the people interact with each other, friendly or distant and wary like they do in big cities. What kind of activities do kids participate in when there's no giant shopping complex to hang out at; do they go in the fields to do cow-tipping?

I welcome all sort of information regarding life in the countryside.

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I live in a small rural village in Wiltshire. We've been here 4 months and I've been astonished by how welcoming and friendly people are here. My husband and I both smoke and, because we're renting a property, we smoke outside. We've met most of our neighbors this way. When I'm outside people usually stop by to chat, or we complain about the weather (it's an English thing...it's in our DNA).

There are two shops in the village and, again, everyone is friendly. My husband had no trouble fitting in with the locals at the pub and always comes home with juicy village gossip.

I've lived in other villages elsewhere and it's usually the same, people seem quite friendly and welcoming. As long as you're friendly in return and make an effort to become part of the village, there's never usually a problem.

Things for kids to do: Not a lot. This village has a little place for kids to hang out with computers, etc. and it has a Youth Council. I have noticed one or two of the older kids hanging around the village pond chucking things in it.

I used to work for a now defunct Government commission that was set up to deal with rural social issues. One of the biggest problems was getting funding for villages to set up something to keep kids occupied.

I moved to Norfolk from London eleven and a half years ago. The house I live in is a four hundred year old farmhouse that about 150 years ago was divided into two. There is a modern bungalow on one side that has a lot of land. Mum, dad and three daughters live there. T'other side is a row of cottages that were, according to myth and legend, built by soldiers who had returned from the Peninsular Wars. There are bottles built into the walls. I know two of the four people who live there - but I know them all by sight. The couple who live in the cottage nearest to me have one child and another expected. The MIL of the chap runs the village shop - which is about half to three quarters of mile from mine. I rarely go into the village and when I do go it is to have a meal. There are two Inns, one church and a primary school. The post office was closed down about a year ago. On the outskirts of the village is a playing field that is used by many of the villagers - adults and kids alike - to play various games, the most popular of which are probably football and cricket. There is a small hall that has a bar, changing rooms and other facilities - but it is small. I've been there a couple of times and the people are very friendly. The local kids seem to have strange pass times - I've seen some of them riding their bikes across local fields, other congregating in the car park of one of the local supermarkets. The Supermarket Kids have small motorised bikes, smoke and have their hoodies up. Other kids may join the Army Training Corps - the the Navy/Air Force equivalents. There is a youth centre but it is under threat because funding may be cut. A large youth orchestra rehearse there.

For the last two weeks the road outside my house has been closed and I have walked to the nearest roundabout to meet a colleague who is giving me a lift into work every day. On the walk to the roundabout I have passed various neighbours and we always say 'good morning' to each other - or the Norfolk alternative 'yewalright?' which is a standard greeting. Some of the men who are working on the road have also passed by and we exchange greetings.

I have found every one very friendly and helpful.

I grew up in a small Sussex village and spend a fair bit of time there still (all those relatives!)

I find that in rural areas people can afford to be a bit friendlier - you don't get lost in the shuffle of faces. For some people this is a bit too much (all that gossip, see?) But as Firedrake says, as long as you're willing to be friendly, people will be friendly back. Just expect everyone to know quite a lot about you very quickly.

Things for kids to do:

Up to about 8-10, it's great. Playground, kids room in the social club, plenty of activities, after school clubs, riding, all sorts.

For teenagers...more of a problem, but then teenagers could get bored at Nasa lol. They have a few things though, including a weekly film up at the hall, youth club, PC access, volunteer groups, sports (very hot on cricket, footy and rugby, plus a good badminton teen squad) etc. No cow tipping, though you get the odd prank or two, although this is tricky, as we have a school there for boys with, hmm, problems, mostly emotional. Older teens generally go into town (five miles away), where there's still not much to do (youth club again, bowling, cinema, getting friendly in the park), but at least the people selling alcohol don't know their exact date of birth, their parents, siblings, cousins and family tree back for the last 200 years, so they have a hope of getting under age booze.

IdiotsRUs said:

Just expect everyone to know quite a lot about you very quickly.

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Yes! A couple of years ago I was too ill to drive to the docs so got a taxi there and back. Everyone knew! One or two neighbours knocked on the door to see if I needed any shopping and to make sure I was alright. I had not met them before - but they made the time to check.

I'm a bit more cynical and say people are nosy rather than friendly!

My village is quite dull and mostly a mix of commuters, retired people and the rich (and sometimes famous). It would be a mistake to assume people who live in the country also work in the country today. There simply aren't enough jobs to do. I don't know what the kids do. I imagine most of them spend all their time in cyber space. You never seem to see any around.

In terms of friendliness, I have lived in more friendly towns and cities.

I was born in a tiny village. Now none of the original residents live there, its all commuter types living in converted cottages and cowbarns. Neighbors still speak, but only on their way to their cars or when the 'ladies' have organised an event in the new, modern village hall. (they sold the old one and converted it to yet another big house).

It's a good thing really because petrol prices are so silly now that the original farm worker residents wouldn't have been able to afford to get to town. Who knows, perhaps the village shop might have had to reopen?

The village church now shares a vicar with four other parishes.

It's a bit weird to tell the truth. I don't go.

And the children go to lots of lessons and 'proper' after school activities that will look good on their CV - in town, in the cars.

I was born and raised in a tiny village in Northamptonshire. My family lived there for maybe fifteen years before we moved.

It was a pretty good place to be a kid. No crime whatsoever, no vandalism, not even traffic. We used to walk down the middle of the road without fear, because you could hear a car coming from a mile away. We got more horses than lorries. There was a little playground with some goalposts and we played football a lot with the other local kids. We also looked for conkers, climbed trees, picked blackberries, explored the local footpaths, etc.

The opportunities for older kids were extremely limited because there was literally no public transport - you couldn't even catch a bus to the nearest town ten miles up the road. Even popping to the cinema was a major operation, requiring our parents to drive us there and back. There was a tiny post office which sold milk and newspapers and so on, but the opening hours were very limited, it being a post office, and that was the only business in the village. No pub, no school, no garage, etc.

Although my parents had lived there for 15+ years, when we moved away my mother commented that she always felt slightly out of place there, because we were one of the newest families in the village. Everybody else's grandparents had been born there.

Just a few notes from a rural childhood.

edit to add: I think most residents worked in the town up the road. My mother certainly did. One family ran the local farm and there was a couple who ran the post office. My poor dad used to drive into Milton Keynes at Godawful o'clock in the morning and get the train into London, where he worked for the Civil Service at the time.

I used to live in a village in leafy Warwickshire. It's been there a long time and is mentioned in the Doomsday book. People there were pretty friendly, especially as I had quite a few family members living there. I was generally introduced as "the plumber's daughter," and the general response was, "What, another one? How many bleedin' daughters has he got?" There was absolutely nothing for teens to do and social life centered on the several pubs, with a couple of them having family rooms. Drugs were only a problem when the local dealers ran out.

ETA: I just remembered how annoyed people would get if you called it a village. It was officially a market town.

One of my uncles lives in a village in Bedfordshire. I've been there a couple of times; by the sounds of what others have said in this thread and by the looks of the village, it's a similar situation to others. And it's worth mentioning every time I see him, he tells me the village has just the one pub so the landlord can charge whatever he wants.

we recently moved from Belfast to a little village about 20 miles further south. There are about five houses, no shop, no pub, one post box. It's two miles from a bus route and four miles from the nearest shop. I don't know who my neighbours are because they are in the village and we aren't. It's a lovely new house, all mod cons so no issues with heat/light/dosgy plumbing. We have the horses at home and loads of space.

Mostly the little one plays in the garden, or rides her pony or chases the cat.

The issues that we have are the lack of convience, we have to stock up on food and essentials, and when it freezes we can't even get out of our driveway, let alone make it down narrow and twisty country roads, so we are essentiall trapped in the house. We also can't get a take away delivered, and if we buy one, by the time we get home it's cold, so we;'ve been cooking at home a lot more.

It's also really really dark. we don't have street lights on country lanes, and aside from our house lights, there is nothing around us. Means we can see every star though, which is really nice.

It's also noisy in a weird quiet way. It's so quiet that any sound carries for miles, at night we can hear the sheep eating outside, which is weird.

As for cow tipping, anyone caught doing that deserves what they get. Having seen cows suffering some pretty severe injuries from it, including cuts that need stitiches, broken legs and broken ribs - which result in the cow getting shot - the kids would be lucky if the police got them before the farmer did.

shaldna said:

we recently moved from Belfast to a little village about 20 miles further south. There are about five houses, no shop, no pub, one post box. It's two miles from a bus route and four miles from the nearest shop. I don't know who my neighbours are because they are in the village and we aren't. It's a lovely new house, all mod cons so no issues with heat/light/dosgy plumbing. We have the horses at home and loads of space.

The issues that we have are the lack of convience, we have to stock up on food and essentials, and when it freezes we can't even get out of our driveway, let alone make it down narrow and twisty country roads, so we are essentiall trapped in the house. We also can't get a take away delivered, and if we buy one, by the time we get home it's cold, so we;'ve been cooking at home a lot more.

It's also really really dark. we don't have street lights on country lanes, and aside from our house lights, there is nothing around us. Means we can see every star though, which is really nice.

It's also noisy in a weird quiet way. It's so quiet that any sound carries for miles, at night we can hear the sheep eating outside, which is weird.

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The horror stories I could write with a set up like this...

*drools*

shaldna said:

It's also really really dark. we don't have street lights on country lanes, and aside from our house lights, there is nothing around us. Means we can see every star though, which is really nice.

It's also noisy in a weird quiet way. It's so quiet that any sound carries for miles, at night we can hear the sheep eating outside, which is weird.

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When I moved into town, it took me months to get used to the streetlights and general noise. Foxes etc, I sleep through. But dear gods there was traffic! In the village (which we lived just outside of, so fields all round) we had about three cars and the milk lorry pass. Here, there was cars and stuff! All the time, like at least once an hour!

Drove me nuts for months.

The lads in my dad's village play football in the small playground. When it gets too dark to play there, they move out onto the area by the bus shelter and chippie, and play on and on and on. I have no idea what the girls do; I never see them.

People are no friendlier than in the rural area where I live. They'll say hello to you rather than ignore you like city folk.

Where I live, the kids play on their bikes. There seem to be fewer bikes where my dad lives.

I think I need to get out more.

If we catch furriners or strangers in my village after sunset, we lock them in a huge wicker statue and set fire to it.



(I just brought the tone down, didn't I? Again.)

Priene said:

If we catch furriners or strangers in my village after sunset, we lock them in a huge wicker statue and set fire to it.



(I just brought the tone down, didn't I? Again.)

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Yes you did! But that is the price of telling the truth.

I lived in a small Scottish village and felt pretty much like an outsider for the first two years. People were polite but not friendly. When I went into the pub they stared at me silently and I felt like I was sitting in some one's seat. It only slowly got better when people I worked with warmed up and effectively vouched for me and sponsored me into the social circle.

I grew up in a village in Norfolk. It was larger than some and right on the coast some come summer time there were loads of tourists. ("Bloody tourists," we used to say.)

As kids we were happy to play on the park, go to the beach, maybe go to the city (20 miles away) for some shopping, or just play with friends.

A lot of teens hang out in the amusement arcade or in the bus shelters. There's not much for them to do except drink and smoke. When I was 14 (I'm now 22) I was drinking in the local pubs, playing pool and having fun. A lot of teens vandalise stuff now. It's now bad but occassionally you'll find a kicked in beach hut or graffiti'd bus shelter.

Gossip is rife. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing. My mum is the secretary at the local school and she hears everything. Recently there was a murder in the village. First I heard it was a woman in her 40s who had been stabbed to death, there was blood everywhere and she used to work in the post office, she was called Jude.

Actually turns out it was a woman in her 60s who was strangled.

Everyone was saying to me "have you heard about the Mundesley murder!?"

It's that bad, a murder is exciting for those villagers.

Most people, even strangers, say hi if you are out on a walk. It's likely that you'll say hello to people and talk about your life despite not knowing who they are. Even if you haven't seen someone for months or years they'll stop and chat.

I had a 20 minute chat with a guy who looked vaguely familiar. When we walked away I had to ask my mum who he was. He was the old caretaker from the school I went to when I was EIGHT!

English villages used to be largely inhabited by people who worked locally. Nowadays they are more likely to be inhabited by commuters. My father's village has a supermarket, a post office (in the supermarket), and a butcher's, a pizza house and a chinese takeaway. It used also to have a dress shop, florists, and hairdressers, when my folks first moved in. I think the pizza house is the only new place to open in a while. There was an engineering firm but that's closed and the land is to be developed for housing. So if you don't work for the few remaining shops or on the land, you probably work in one of the big out-of-town retail parks or garden centres, or in a nearby town.

There are roughly two factions in the village, one of which wants development of the village into a town. The other wants it to stay a village, so they are opposed to development. One attempt at development got stalled when access was blocked through a ransom strip. You can still see the half-built houses. Some years ago the villagers got highly energised by a developer who was using common land for access to his building site.

It's a quiet village. Sitting by the window in the evenings you can hear every car door slam because there's no background noise to drown it out. There's birdsong. In the late evenings you hear owls. Visiting one time I looked out of the window in the afternoon and there was a fox on the lawn.

But...

no one has talked about the spites and that gossip which is aimed at one family or person or set of people, often is not even vaguely correct, but truly slanderous.

Or the villagers versus newcomers who are commuters strife.

Or the gossip about who is sleeping with whose husband (it is usually aimed at a woman) which is totally incorrect and often manufactured to create havoc.

I have lived for longer than a year in villages in Canada, Oz, NZ, the UK, and Japan. Doesn't matter where you are the people are all the same in their actions and reactions.

If you are writing about the UK and know damn all about the place it's the cultural things you need to understand not just the setting.

Well, I can't talk about that because I have no experience of it. Bit of a hermit, really. Mostly the gossip I pick up is about what's going on with the Parish Council and what the developer said his lawyer said about the ransom strip, and whether the chap who makes chairs is bending today....

pdr said:

no one has talked about the spites and that gossip which is aimed at one family or person or set of people, often is not even vaguely correct, but truly slanderous.

Or the villagers versus newcomers who are commuters strife.

Or the gossip about who is sleeping with whose husband (it is usually aimed at a woman) which is totally incorrect and often manufactured to create havoc.

I have lived for longer than a year in villages in Canada, Oz, NZ, the UK, and Japan. Doesn't matter where you are the people are all the same in their actions and reactions.

If you are writing about the UK and know damn all about the place it's the cultural things you need to understand not just the setting.

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The people I have met from the village do not indulge in gossip or spite - they were the ones who did voluntary work to help the community. The ones who noticed if someone did not pop into the village shop for their daily paper, loaf and milk. The ones who looked after neighbours when the weather was foul. Like my neighbour who knows that my car is out of order and checked that I did not need any shopping or lifts. He also remonstrated with the blokes who are resurfacing the road and who redid the curb outside mine and did not give me a dropped curb. I have one now! There is also the celebrity living in the village who does concerts in the local church to raise money for good causes. I know that there is probably an element of nastiness in the community but I have not met it. I have met one mega creep (he got his face slapped!) who caused me to stop doing some voluntary work. I hope he is a minority.

My village was rife with gossip, as I mentioned above. It's a fact of life when everyone talks to everyone else. Any news spreads like wildfire.

My mum had an affair and moved in with her new man. They didn't go out for months just because they would get dirty looks. It seems everyone has affairs. I could name at least five people from that village alone who had affairs and the circumstances around which it happened (although all gossip, so might not be true.)

pdr said:

no one has talked about the spites and that gossip which is aimed at one family or person or set of people, often is not even vaguely correct, but truly slanderous.

Or the villagers versus newcomers who are commuters strife.

Or the gossip about who is sleeping with whose husband (it is usually aimed at a woman) which is totally incorrect and often manufactured to create havoc.

I have lived for longer than a year in villages in Canada, Oz, NZ, the UK, and Japan. Doesn't matter where you are the people are all the same in their actions and reactions.

If you are writing about the UK and know damn all about the place it's the cultural things you need to understand not just the setting.

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The only gossip I've heard is that the locals don't like the man who lives in the Big House. He goes to the local (pub) every weekend and buys half a pint with a 50 pound note. He brags about the horses he has in training and where they're running. No one believes him because apparently he's gone tits-up financially.

There's also gossip about the other pub in the village, which is about to go tits-up. The repo men came and took the cash register and spirits and the landlord is keeping the cash in a drawer now. He fired the chef because he was helping himself to vodka and, frankly, his food was shite, he put piri-piri sauce in everything

There are locals and commuters here. Swindon is only 10 minutes away and it's a big employment centre (allegedly...I've yet to find a job there). I don't get any sense of friction. One of the locals said to me.."People move here, say they're going to stay a little while and then end up staying forever." . The non-locals get involved in village life as much as the locals as far as I can tell. The general store/post office is very friendly. The staff know most of the customers and, as Shakesbear mentioned, they'd be worried if a 'regular' didn't turn up for their daily loaf and pint of milk.

The Parish Council doesn't appear to have much pull with the County Council, who seem to ignore every recommendation the Parish Council makes, especially when it comes to planning decisions.

i dunno, perhaps we're lucky. This is a friendly village.