Complaining about Village life?

Exactly- They need to ask your permission- plus it’s meant to be drag hunting now- where a trail is laid over a known course with good jumps.

Unless you live in Eire?

That is why i could never live rural. The smell alone would put me right off. My DSis on the other hand absolutely loves the smell. We went away the other year and just round the corner from where we were staying was a pig farm. I spent the entire week gipping every time we walked past it. Although I did discover right at the end of the week I was Pregnant and my sense of smell had massively increased. Unfortunately it had increased to anything that smelt disgusting. Anything nice smelling just smelt the same.

I hate to interrupt a good argument but I work in transport so it might be of help.

Complain to your council about lack of buses and ask if they are planning a transport on demand scheme. It gets called by a few different names but it basically means you can book for a bus to come to your nearest bus stop. They are undergoing trials all over at the moment and the more people requesting them the more likely they are to appear near you.

@horseyhorsey17 Have you heard of compulsory purchase orders? No farmer doesn’t want mega bucks from housing!
Housing areas are identified via local plans. Farmers might not get any choice. Labour might choose to abolish local plans as they haven’t produced enough housing sites. They seem to want to get rid of planning constraints which is quite a Tory type idea. We have unbelievably slow development processes here with local councils and a planning inspectorate taking forever!

HA putting in a few houses in rural communities is different as they buy at farm land prices. Housing developers don’t.

Thoroughly enjoying this thread! I don't live in the countryside, too much of a town mouse to, but the school complaints resonate a lot. Recall my DS's school being told to keep the noise down during the children's outdoor break by a house next to the playground. Moreover, it was during Covid cold months when they'd all been confined to their classrooms the rest of the day. New residents, of course, who must have assumed the building was actually a centre for silent retreat, and the play area some sort of sculptural installation.

The reason for this is because poor rural people have been forced to move to the towns to look for work, and they've been replaced by rich urbanites who fancy a 'quieter life' after city careers. This is also why there's so much moaning in villages, as the thread is all about.

I grew up in the middle of nowhere. Village? I wish! Nearest neighbour two miles away.

This reminds me of a thread years ago by someone who was incandescent with rage that someone's horse pooped on the road outside their house. She seemed to think riders carry a shovel and bag...

I don't think it's that black and white. That also relies on farmers selling up. Maybe they will choose not to - unlikely given that farming has been destroyed by successive governments, with Brexit the final nail in the coffin, but we can but hope.

We will have to have a compromise between house building and NIMBYism. There's no other way forward. Doubtless the Tories and right wing press will blame immigrants though.

@horseyhorsey17 So you think Labour built enough? They haven’t for exactly the same reasons. No one wants housing near them. So Labour will get lots of objections for 1.5m homes too. We do have some brownfield sites but the cost of cleaning il
is huge. Who pays? It will either be the housebuilders or housing association. HAs have to borrow to build. It’s not free money from the government. So if we are going to build we need land. There’s no option of “being sensible”. This number of homes will be where people don’t want them and will be on farmland.

Rural poverty is hit and miss here there's a lot of bartering goes on plus good will. I can buy a whole lamb for the freezer, part of a cow. Let out my field for three months, sell eggs , have a dry stone wall rebuilt, have a septic tank put in get rat arsed on home made wine, enjoy honey from local hives. We exchange stuff.

We also did, tow neighbours out in bad weather, worked over night bringing in the hay bales . Run around herding escaped sheep and the odd pony.

Actually, poverty is quite a bit less common in rural areas than urban areas (esp if you exclude London and look at basically any other region - rural Yorkshire vs urban Yorkshire, for example)!

In most countries, rural poverty is a real issue. The UK is unusual in that incomes are higher, on average, in rural areas. Probably in part because most of what's considered rural in the UK isn't actually very rural by the standards of anywhere else due to our high density of population and greenbelt policies. Most villages are not that far from their nearest city, compared with the US or even countries like France.

We do need new homes though - we've got a huge housing crisis because the Tories haven't built anywhere near enough for the last 10 years, certainly not affordable homes. Like you I am worried that this could end up with the countryside being sold off for housing estates - it's disappearing fast enough as it is - but hopefully Labour will be sensible. Although the problem with Westminster - and this goes for all the main parties - is that they never consider rural dwellers, politicians live in an urban bubble and seem to regard the countyside and farming as some sort of afterthought. Rural poverty has been a massive problem for decades.

Once again: brownfield development is a great idea, but only if we are going to focus on these being decent places to live (rather than crappy human-storage pits to shove people into so we don't have to have any housing cluttering up our pretty chocolate-box view).

That means decontaminating, greening and beautifying brownfield sites, esp if they used to be things like industrial estates. If you do loads of apartment building in the center of towns, suburbanites and rural dwellers need to be grown-up about the fact that cities will change as a result, especially since most of the parking places will disappear and the roads will be narrowed for bus/cycle lanes and you'll probably have to use a parkNride and public transit to come into town. All doable, but people need to OK with these tradeoffs.

@Emotionalsupportviper You just wait until Labour identify land for 1.5 million homes! What’s going to left to farm you might ask! Certainly won’t be enough brown field sites.

As for village life. We live in a tiny place but no crops grown in the fields so no messy farmers. Only a hovel for a church so no bells. However we have had a series of bossy, interfering, objectionable and self opinionated people here. They object to everything. Well nearly - some people are exempt as they are mates. They report anything they think needs reporting. Usually made up! Or just plain mischief making. They have planted the village pond with garden pond plants that have choked it. In nearly 40 years there’s always been a surprise around the corner and it’s rarely pleasant.

I don't know why people aren't prepared to collect their rich nature's bounty any more

Because their gardens are botanical deserts.

It used to be collected for this very purpose ("nightsoil"). Not a job I would want myself, but people took what they could get, historically speaking.

Perfectly designed by natural evolution to steal chips and sh!t on heads - who doesn't love the raucous screech of a mewling seagull?

😅

@Motherofkitteys

the man was absolutely furious that my horse had left a No 2 outside his drive……….he wanted to know when I was coming back to collect it

You can bring your horse past our house - I'll be out like a shot with my shovel! My compost heap would think it was it's birthday!

I don't know why people aren't prepared to collect their rich nature's bounty any more

😂😂😂😂😂

waves stick

lets the bull out

I agree (should have read a post further down before I made my previous comment)

Good farmland is at a premium in the UK now and it is being sold off for building at an awful rate.

I get very angry when perfectly serviceable brownfield sites are ignored by developers in favour of Greenfield ones - and that govt lets them get away with it and arranges compulsory purchase.

It would be slightly less enraging if these were social housing for people in the area, but you can bet your life that they will be "executive developments" which will be well out of the price range of the average new buyer.

😂

I imagine that all of the farm workers who regularly, summer and winter alike, have to work through the night, or get out of bed at 2am on a wet and dreary morning to see to stock etc were incredibly sympathetic to her plight.

@DdraigGoch

Thank you, my little Red Dragon!

I enjoyed that. LOL!

Clarkson's Farm was a great show for anyone who doesn't like him. He gets shouted at by the builder, shouted at by Kaleb, shouted at by Charlie and shouted at by Lisa. He also needed a favour from the Caravan Club so they made him record this:

I can't understand Clarkson's popularity.

He's like Peppa Pig for middle-aged men.

Do love a good villager moan.
On our village fb page during harvest a villager asked what was going on? As for over a week tractors had been going up and down at all hours and asked when it might stop as had been keeping her children awake. There were a few witty responses along the lines of “ it’s called food production” and “I don’t imagine the weather is waiting for your children to sleep”