People living in the countryside moaning about rural life

[SuePreemly]

I live in a village. New housing estates have gone in recently. Since then we've had complaints on the local FB page about:

Horse poo on roads
Crow scarers in the field being loud
Slurry smells
Dust during combine season

What on earth do people who move into a rural village surrounded by fields expect?

They're always on about having "consideration for others" on their posts, whilst showing none to the place and people whose work involves it 🥴

You should do the digital version and set up a Facebook page!

We had a suggestion to the Parish Council that riders carry horse poo bags….😵‍💫

Wait until it’s harvest time and the thrips arrive, same bloody posts on Facebook every year 🤦🏼‍♀️🤣

Don’t get me started on this! We live in a village in the lakes and we go so many newbies or tourist complaining about all of the above! Honestly go to a city 😆

All you can do is just laugh at such stupidity.

This thread is making me very homesick for the farm where I grew up. I live in a small city now, and only occasionally smell the slurry spreading.

I’m pretty sure when my brother did his army training the benchmark was a nine-minute mile as part of passing the fitness test!!

Yes it's completely gross, and chemicals can be used instead

Loving this. I run a small holiday complex and complaints from guests include:
birds shouting from 5:30
loud sheep
narrow muddy roads you get dirty wheels
tractors/ combine not reversing to allow you to pass
farm noise in all its guises
footpaths through mud tracks and fields (they should be tarmac)
footpaths do not have signs like roads
footpaths are not lit at night
no Ubers or taxis
takeaways do not deliver
it’s to dark
to many insects
slow wifi
cows are scarey and need to be under strict control
no mobile signal
and my favourite the rain is wetter and therefore to wet!

Chemicals??? No thank you. What a way to keep on ruining the soil, and hastening global warming. Slurry is an ecologically sane way of utilising as much waste as possible.

I love the smell of pig farms, Denmark was heaven for me

I blame Escape to the Country - wonderful scenery, fabulous community, peace and quiet, etc etc. No mention of the natural downsides of living in a village - farm smells, difficult-to-navigate lanes, poor travel options, etc etc. But, of course, if you move to any location you can't expect everything to change to suit your tastes. They should do their homework first.

I don't like country living but when I did live in a village I recall better off families moving to sought after and expensive houses in the heart of the village and then complaining about the live music from the nearby pub - which many of the longstanding locals enjoyed. The pub eventually closed.

I'm from the countryside (grew up on a farm) and having moved around a bit, I find people from the countryside are often as weird as fuck. Barely leave the village, suspicious of anyone who hasn't lived there all their life, are racist and xenophobic, shoot anything that moves and think everyone who lives in the countryside has to love fox hunting.

Not that I'm a huge fan of city folk, but I don't think either extreme is great.

And the amount of London folk with 4x4 who can not or refuse to reverse to a passing place, or who refuse to move over near bushes when passing - presumably so their car does not get scratched.
And I refuse to drive my small car into a ditch that it would never get out of. I did have a stand off with one man in a fancy 4x4 who refused to reverse. I ended up just turning the engine off and waiting. The passing place was a very short reverse for him, and about quarter of a mile for me.
It looks ridiculous of you have a 4x4 in the countryside but act as if you are driving a sports car.

Right! So you have to be pretty fit and very focused to do 2 miles in 20 minutes.

Building new houses without thought to infastructure is not restricted to the country. We've had over a thousand units build in our London Borough, no extras GPs, hospital beds, schools etc, although we do have excellent public transport links.

We are very rural. Unfortunately we have a neighbour about .25 mile away. They are from the city. They complain about our chickens. They complain about the tractors, the sun. The cold. The wind. But especially the mud on the roads from the tractor. Their address literally has “farm” in it. What did they expect?

We get snowed in two or three times a year. We are in north east Scotland and very high up and three miles from a main road. Our driveway is .5 mile long. Need a tractor to clear it. The farmer snow ploughs clear the road at the top once a day but it comes down hard and fast sometimes with the drifts we can be in for a week at a time

I was all prepared to think you were going to be unreasonable, but as someone who lives in a small town and works in the countryside, I agree!!!!

I used to keep bees, dry cow shit was the best smoker fuel. Of course anytime someone saw a bee, or was stung by one, it must have been one of mine.

I actually own all the rabbits around here, according to the townies who have moved in down the road. Because I 'admitted' to having a burrow on my land, then every single rabbit around here is living on my 5 acre field and it is therefore my responsibility to 'deal' with them because they keep eating my neighbours veg patch.

Oh please… no thanks

I think I’m weird for many reasons but none of the reasons you state. My family is of mixed heritage and with religion I am very much each to their own, I’ve never shot a gun at anything except a clay pigeon and I’m a vegetarian. In fact I don’t know anyone who lives near me that fits your description except one of my neighbours does shoot pheasants to eat occasionally.

Your view of people who live in the countryside is very bitter sounding.

So, I can see absurdities from both sides, here (in the small village we live on the edge of).

We moved here in 2010 so will forever be regarded as 'incomers' but I think have settled in pretty well, and DH had a semi-rural childhood, so none of it is alien to him. And I'm sensible and not an arse.

But there are LOADS of fecking ignorant noobs (some of whom, given their level of education, you'd really hope would know better) who complain about: the tractors, the sileage, the escaped sheep in the gardens (actually that is bloody annoying and the farm's fault), the smells, and my personal favourite, the querulous enquiry in the village facebook group about why the church bells were always 'going mad' on Wednesday evenings (that's bellringing practice night. She seemed not to understand what that is or why it needed to take place). Same woman bitches about each and every fun activity, event or trail that takes place in the village because it's run by the church or for the benefit of the church. Very few of them are faith-focussed but it just happens that the church here functions as a social hub and heart of the village. I'm an atheist and I think that's really nice. Anyway.

But on the other hand, there are a few born-in-the-villagers who come out with some really stupid, insular things too. Like our neighbours, who would like a better view of the horizon and therefore would like ALL the trees in all the gardens bordering their own to be cut down. Or the woman who, during the first lockdown, was very concerned that Youth were attending illegal gatherings in the layby at the edge of the village and that they would be coming from Outside The Village and therefore bring the Plague in with them... (I assume she wasn't herself attending these parties.) It's a nice village in a prosperous county, about ten miles outside one of the most expensive towns to live in in the UK, and not a remote outpost, but some of the ingrained attitudes are fairly cringeworthy. Not to mention racist on occasion.

The whole Thing of townie incomers upsetting the locals with their absurd expectations is centuries old though. I remember writing an A Level essay about this very theme in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park.

My parents rurally and one of their neighbours is like this. Hates the noise of the country etc.

She Is also a (self proclaimed) ‘eco warrior.’ However she lives in a massive house and drives a Range Rover with a bumper sticker that says ‘Climate Action NOW!!!’ 😏

NoPowerInTheVerse Sadly, Show of Hands are themselves no longer available.