Complaining about Village life?

I used to live rurally and our local blacksmith was driven out of business because they built a housing estate next to his forge, and people couldn't stand the noise or the horses.

This is a weekly game round my way 😀

I like a jolly little hairy pony, myself - the sort with a bit of a beard - you know they the - whiskery little chins (not unlike my good self 😁).

I stay at a distance, though, because I am not comfortable with horses and they smell my fear!

We have new neighbours who are complaining about the number of people walking past their house heading for the school building.

We live in a small village and the school building is basically everything - before school kids stuff, after school kids stuff, evening kids and adult stuff, food bank, community centre… If something is happening in the village it’s either in the school or the pub. Even church stuff is happening in the school as the church is basically falling down. The main play park in the village is at our street as well.

There is a walking bus for the kids stuff that meets in the pub car park to stop the street getting clogged with cars. It’s really well organised. The pub also happily allow people to park there for any event in the school, which is good of them.

It’s basically not a street to live in if you don’t like people walking by. New neighbours are not happy at all with it.

You have my sympathy.
Can't you report them for grubbing up a hedge without a licence?

A friend who kept horses close to some posh houses was once rung up on a Sunday morning and asked if she could wash her horses because they were having people round for dinner and 'the horses look a bit scruffy when we look out at the view'.
In fact, they were not scruffy-looking. They weren't jolly hairy little ponies, they were rather well-bred and well-kept horses. But even the sleekest looking horses like a roll occasionally.

Tractors really aren't that noisy unless you're very close, like if her house was right on the field boundary and they were cutting right up to her house. In which case, they would only be doing that for a very short period of time anyway. Farmers sometimes have to work at night because bad weather is coming and they need to harvest. That's just something you have to accept if you live in the country.
If possible, I'd be cutting close to houses in the daytime and as far away as I could at night. If the farmer isn't doing that it makes me wonder if the family is a PITA in general....

We live in a village next to an equestrian centre. Folk moan about horse shit constantly, the horses were here before the new estate. I said ‘once it rains it just turns to grass’ and was accused by the complainer of being an inconsiderate horse rider and it was obviously my horses shit. I don’t own a horse and I’m slightly scared of them. It became really mental.

The broadband and 4G signal where we live is better than in many city locations. When using Just Park in Kingston upon Thames to park overnight I had to walk down the street to get sufficient signal to pay.

To be fair, when we bought our house opposite a school, it was a lower school, with children aged 5 to 9. Almost all the children were local and walked to school.

Over the years, they have added a 4+ unit, then a nursery, then offered wrap-around care, and now take children from 4 to 12, and from all over the place, meaning parents for the most part, have to drive. The traffic is chaos around drop off and pick up times, and the parking has to be seen to be believed!

I’ve never heard “farmer with a hamlet in the middle of our fields”. I suppose that is what it is from your perspective. Which came first, the farm or the hamlet? I’m guessing a farmer with a few homes to house farm workers, now all modernized and maybe enlarged? Was the original farmer’s home fancy? Was it owned by gentry? Please ignore if I’m being too nosy!

I’ve lived rural ish all my life, and I hate the smell of muck. Especially here because it smells like pig shit.

I think part of the problem is that people who work inside in offices forget that the countryside literally is many people’s place of work.

So some of the horse-riders might be enjoying a leisure activity, but others might be professional horse people, and the person who runs the livery is running a business.

The person who complains about tractors running all night doesn’t appreciate that the demand for the machinery is focused on a few days when weather conditions are right, that the machinery is so expensive it has to be run 24/7 to justify the cost, and if we don’t get crops in at the correct time critical moment, we could potentially lose all or part of our profits for that year.

And that’s after we’ve battled adverse weather conditions, pests, a huge amount of red tape, price fluctuations and hostile pricing from supermarket chains. So sorry but no, compared to those issues, whether a neighbour’s sleep is disturbed slightly or not by the harvest , isn’t a huge priority for us in the scheme of things.

Especially when they have chosen to move to a place where their nearest neighbours are farmers.

Ooh yes we’ve had this one too during the harvest. All new build houses backing onto farmland, several were shocked to learn harvesting doesn’t happen 9-5.

We have lots of horses two menage in the village so loads of horses on the lanes. One rental complained to the police and the council regularly wanting horse pooh banned from the lanes

My neighbour complains about our chickens because she’s worried they might get into her garden.. they don’t.
She says the tractors scare her cat. She moans about the cold and the wind and the sun and the heat. The smell of manure, the deer, the rabbits.
Her address literally has “farm“ in it. They rent and could simply move but I think she just likes to complain.

Well I don’t blame you for holding that opinion if their behaviour is obnoxious; there is no excuse for that and I would feel the same way! That’s totally fair enough.

I know tempers can become frayed in difficult situations between antis and hunt supporters but that applies to both sides. When I have encountered them during their ordinary course of duty, the hunt servants have gone out of their way to be polite and civil.

Around here they are very keen to keep the locals on side and they have a representative who visits farms and keeps relations on an even keel.

OH and a man with binoculars and a camera around his neck having a go at OH walking our two working dogs walking quietly shouting "I've lived here ten years your dogs are scaring the wildlife"

OH response"I've lived her 70 years so bugger off"

I live in a village which is heavily wooded. It is now predominantly second home owners who complain, yes you have guessed it, about the trees. This is to such an extent that the local council put TPO's on the ones complained about. They make a huge fuss about leaf fall as well. They don't like anyone parking on the public road either although they bought houses facing a 100 bed residential home for older adults.

Another neighbour has recently ripped out a beautiful stretch of evergreen hedging which has been in place for at least seventy years I am aware of. It faces a listed church and graveyard and it's part of the landscape of the village. Apparently the council could not do anything because it did not form the boundary of agricultural land. If I had some livestock on my garden, they would have been forced to replant it. I just don't get it. Why do they even live here.

The countryside stinks, has no street lighting, you need a car to drive to the shops and the roads flood. Internet is rubbish and you get electricity cuts. Cows and sheep feel free to graze your garden and random dogs run around crapping in it as well. Life is tough.

My OH once in exasperation said to a chief moaner living on the edge of an entrance to a woodland walkers zone in our village who was trying to chase off walkers. "BUGGER off back to Manchester"

His reply was "How do you know I'm from Manchester?"

I was then howling with laughter which didn't help

They must have really wound you up by the sound of it. The new fence will be spectacular!

Whose hedge did they remove? Yours or theirs?

Our current favourite neighbours ripped out the hedges between their garden and the fields to improve their view and now moan if a cow ends up in their garden, if only there was something that could prevent it from happening. We are now planning on replacing the missing hedge with rusting, redundant farm equipment and bedframes all tied together with baler twine.

GOOD!

Serves them right.

Not only have they removed a hedge which didn't belong to them, and which they had no right to interfere with, but they have destroyed a vital part of the local ecosystem that local wildlife relies upon. I'd have added a bull to that field if it had been up to me. Or a couple of pigs. They are intelligent and curious creatures, as you will know, and would love to visit your neighbours in their home.

(If you need anything to make up your fence my next-door neighbour has a minion old fridge freezer awaiting disposal. I'm sure they will be delighted to donate it.)

There was a message in our village Facebook once. Moaning about tractors driving over the grass verges. There was a LOT of laughing and deriding the poster.

It was me. I had posted it because one tractor driver had twice in a week driven over the water main and broken it, flooding 3 houses and requiring Severn Trent to work overnight, all noise and bright lights that they also moaned about. The first time ST left a large sign over the drain. The second time they let 2!

I repeated my post, pointing this out a lot more clearly - "Please don't drive over the water main. We ALL lose our water supply" - and the driver was identified by his mum - much to the amusement of all and sundry! 😄

It always amuses me (as someone who grew up in the country and moved to the city), when people move to the country for some 'peace and quiet'. It's honestly much quieter at night where I live (on a main road on the edge of a city). There's no RAF practising night flying over my house, no combines doing the harvest all night long, no livestock making noises, no church bells bonging the hour all night and the roads around here are much cleaner, even the middle of winter. If I go and see my family I have to get my car washed as soon as I get back, because the roads are covered in mud from Sept-Mar with all the farm vehicles using them.

Petition up on ours to stop the lovely young cows being taken to market 😂😂😂😂😂😂