A question for rural living OS members

Tabatha_Kitten

I dont recommend moving to a small village if you value your privacy.
My neighbours know my comings and goings better than I do.
I would certainly never get away with having an affair (Im not !) but any visitors of the opposite sex are immediately in the frame.
My brother coming to stop whilst my husband was away on business kept the village "tittle tattle" going for for a good few weeks.

Frith

Apart from 3 years in a city for Uni (hated living there) I've been here 34 years!

Good points - it is quiet. Probably a car an hour or less at night. We are lucky in that we have a good butcher's shop and a post office/shop which is fine as there are fewer than 100 houses. The village hall has ballroom dancing, belly dancing, karate and yoga classes every week and bingo once a month which sons love! We also put entries in the village show.

I haven't had any problem with nosey neighbours but then we are right at the end of the village with only a couple of houses below ours then miles of fields.

Bad points - lack of schools to choose from. When my son went to high school (no choice!) I found his bus pass does not get paid for because we live more than 6 miles away so it costs me £540 per year...

I suppose living 10 miles from the nearest shop/library etc might be seen as a drawback but I've never known any different.

Not too many power cuts but we did have YEARS of the water going off until the electric pump was changed (we're at the top of a hill).

Hermia

Tabatha_Kitten wrote: »

I dont recommend moving to a small village if you value your privacy.
My neighbours know my comings and goings better than I do.
I would certainly never get away with having an affair (Im not !) but any visitors of the opposite sex are immediately in the frame.
My brother coming to stop whilst my husband was away on business kept the village "tittle tattle" going for for a good few weeks.

A friend of mine moved from the village she grew up in to a town after she became a Buddhist. She said the constant gossip and stares drove her away. One thing I am looking forward to re: moving back to the city is living in a place where no one is really bothered about what you like/wear/believe. One thing I have noticed about the villages where I live is that it's very much us and them and it doesn't take much to find yourself put into the them camp. My hairdresser is a goth, but a very-toned down one (imagine Helena Bonham Carter in a black frock) and she has been having so many problems with dirty looks and comments from middle-aged and elderly people where she lives. It's bizarre.

Gloomendoom

Tabatha_Kitten wrote: »

I dont recommend moving to a small village if you value your privacy.

Ha ha! This is very true.

I live in a village and my wife moved in with me when we got married. She immediately immersed herself in village life and she loves it. There is always something going on.

As someone else said, it helps if you don't mind mud and manure. I commented to my wife this evening that, at the moment, virtually every car in the village is coated in red mud up to window level.

katieowl_2

Interesting what Hermia says, I've not spotted that prejudice here, as it's where a lot of old hippies go to die (West Wales) Alternative faiths seem to be quite excepted too.

Generally, I'd say, if you want to live here, you need to be either self employed, or have an income from somewhere else. There's not a lot of work here, certainly not full time work, and what there is, is nearly all minimum wage. Lots of people (including me) have more than one source of income to make ends meet.

You need to make the effort to fit in, join the village activities etc, especially when you first arrive, and I can understand why the 'locals' are reticent about holiday/weekend cottage villagers TBH.
And remember the first rule of village life, as given to me when I first arrived. NEVER gossip about anyone - you will not know who they are related to!

We moved here from SE London, and I wouldn't go back if you paid me, it's quiet and it feeds my soul. My breath catches everytime I drive into town and see the Preseli hills in the distance.

Just so you know why.... Tonight's sunset!

tori.k

sarah222 wrote: »

We moved to a Welsh village and bought a smallholding. We run our own business and we had the dream of living like River Cottage seems to work - mmmm - it was a dream. We have a village pub but it empty most of time and changes hands so often it unbeliveable. We have a village shop but only tend to go there if desp for something. There is a tesco 15 mins away so most tend to go there. We have alot of mud on roads and in the snow we get snowed in and no one helps and the council only sort the main road and as we live on the mountain if we want to risk sliding down we certainly wont get back up in a vehicle even my discovery struggled last year. I have a horse and lugging water about when pipes are frozen and your vehicle cant get to her is a nightmare. Having said that I know just about everyone and we all wave and chat when see each other but the friendly call on the neighbour in the hour of need isnt really here nor is the village BBQ's etc I was hoping for :-( Been here 11 years now and if we could move we probably would!

Have you thought about organising a BBQ yourself, often i just takes someone to get the ball rolling, unless you participate in your community they may just think a wave and a hello is as involved as you want to be, as for village amenities it's use them or loose them, if you don't support the community they wont/can't support you. we had a major fight to keep the postoffice going a few years back, it actually doesn't effect me if it's there or not as i work in a local town 10miles away, but a lot of the elderly residents need to have this available, with the bus service being so irregular at times especially over winter.

Sambucus_Nigra

dandy-candy wrote: »

Part of my on going plan to be more frugal and old style is to eventually move to the countryside and have a smallholding. It isn't just to have the space to grow my own veg and keep livestock, but to be in a like minded community. I don't want to be anywhere to remote, but on the edge of village seems a perfect idea.
When we do countryside drives we see lots of pretty "Miss Marple" type villages and I would love to live in them. I imagine everyone being quaint and old fashioned, and having village fete's, joining the W.I. etc etc. Is that what village life is really like or did that die out in the 1950's? Have I been watching to many period dramas?

Depends what you think you mean by quaint and old fashioned. We don't even have a village fete. But we do have a village show once a year. So that leaves 364 other days in which we just do regular stuff like eating, sleeping, working, gardening, going to the pub, walking, allotment, seeing friends etc. all of which if I remember correctly you can do outside the countryside.

Life is what you make it not what the tv people want you to think.

tori.k

your right Katieowl it's not that most villages don't like outsiders it's they don't like second home owners, if you take Rock in Cornwall it's around 75% second homes leaving a very elderly resident population, things like there winter bus service was axed due to low demand it's a total ghost town out of season with not enough residents left in place to support it or a full-time shop. the second homeowners kills a community where as an outsider coming in like gloomendoom wife hopefully bolsters it

lostinrates

tori.k wrote: »

your right Katieowl it's not that most villages don't like outsiders it's they don't like second home owners, if you take Rock in Cornwall it's around 75% second homes leaving a very elderly resident population, things like there winter bus service was axed due to low demand it's a total ghost town out of season with not enough residents left in place to support it or a full-time shop. the second homeowners kills a community where as an outsider coming in like gloomendoom wife hopefully bolsters it

There have always been 'second home' owners, albeit in dramatically different proportions.

In many villages in which I live it's the second home owners who have kept the village shop going, made the donations to the major village funds and often provided the traditional venues for things like the fetes. They also keep employment in the smaller satalite villages......especially for things those of us full time in the country might like but could not really hope to support....art galleries, fancier restaurants, plus the volume of work they give to people like gardeners, grooms and tends to be larger. They also tend to pay more than us full timers for things we all want maintained but cannot afford...traditional dry stone walling, hedge laying etc. they keep my peers who want to do this stuff able to do it, in a way very few locals do. This is good for all of us.


The situations where such huge populations are second home owners is very difficult, perhaps we should look to our European neighbours where this is more common, where people escape hot cities for beaches and mou trains and these communities have learned to adapt? Because many of us with lower density of second home owners than places like Cornwall and the parks are also losing our pubs and shops and post offices.....it's not just the second home impact, it's all of us... (money saving such as we laud here is often part of that too, and in all but those very high density areas, the greater part really) . Let's face it, even in city centres, independant shops are losing out to tesco metro....it's a tough time to be an independant shop holder I guess. But in many cases, we in the country bite the hand that feeds many of us when we start getting 'uz and them' about the second home owners.

tori.k

your right that was emotive of me Lost, it's just people and how they interact with the wider community at the end of the day