Stephen McGinty: Truth behind rosy view of village life

A book on Scotland's rural communities shows that they were probably never idyllic, writes Stephen McGinty

Ceres in Fife was one of the few Scots villages with a green, unlike the less populated and harsher Highlands, where there were no villages as such prior to the government's post-Jacobite Rising decision to build roads

WE do tend to hold a bucolic view of village life, one which turns a blind eye to history. John Major conjured a Britain in which maiden aunts cycled to Mass through the morning mist, thatch-roofed pubs served warm beer and the sound of leather on willow drifted up from the village green. Personally, I blame the modern costume drama for selling us the notion of an Edenic idyll.

The antidote to this saccharine sweetness is a particularly grim woodcut from January, 1769 which shows James Eaves, his wife and two young children starved to death in the poorhouse at Catchworth in Hertfordshire. Illustrated to shame the authorities who countenanced their grim end, it is a chilling reminder of the unpleasantness of village life in the past and a reminder that only recently has it taken on the golden glow of a residential dream.

For over the past 60 years, village life in Britain has been transformed. In 1950 a great revolution began in rural life as farmers started to fade. Prior to the Second World War anyone who lived in a village either farmed, or served those who did in pubs, shops and services. After VE Day, when the new mechanisation developed to fight the war was instead trained on the fields, and as a result freed farmhands, the great drift began.

The population of villages changed as a result of increased leisure, longer retirement and the motor car, which allowed people to live an increased distance from where they worked. Pick a village, (almost) any village and the vast majority of the population will have no connection to farming. The one exception is Laxton in Nottinghamshire, which is unique in still operating the open field system and has 15 working farms in the immediate vicinity,

So what is a village? The definition often used is a rural settlement which had to be capable of sustaining the essentials of daily life - for the material, the shop and pub; for the spiritual, the church and minister and lest the whole edifice collapse into chaos, a squire or policeman to apply hierarchy and a strong sense of to whom one's cap should be doffed.

Loss of any of these key ingredients and the venture tumbles down the ladder to the status of a hamlet, likewise should the site accrue civic buildings or banks or further stages of education such as colleges then it was elevated to that of a town.

Size is relative, A population of 2,000 to a Londoner is a village, but to those north of York it can be a metropolis. During the medieval, Tudor and Stuart periods, a village became a town when it achieved a royal charter which permitted the holding of a market. The local lord of the manor, anxious to achieve higher rents, sought the charter only to see the fledgling town slide back into a village if visitors failed to flock. In Scotland the oldest villages, such as Rosemarkie in the Black Isle, are failed burghs.

I have recently returned from an extensive tour around the villages of Scotland, from Gretna Green in the south to Durness in the north, from Lonmay in the east to Callanish in the Western Isles, while also circumnavigating a further 99 in between those four compass points and all without stepping across the threshold of my own nook. God bless the book in general and Clive Aslet's Villages of Britain in particular. The editor-at-large of Country Life magazine has alerted me to the fact that Burghead celebrates Hogmanay on 11 January as it clings true to the Julian calendar. (When the rest of Britain switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, they rioted at the loss of 11 days from their lives.)

The village of Ceres in Fife has held Highland games since 1314, longer than any other village and is one of the few Scottish villages with a green; Dreghorn in Ayrshire was home of John Boyd Dunlop, inventor of the pneumatic tyre, while 30,000 people once toiled at the munitions works at Gretna Green, kneading nitroglycerine and guncotton into an explosive paste, which during a visit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called "the Devil's Porridge."

According to Mr Aslet, Scotland "barely had villages as they would be recognised in England before Lowland agriculture was "improved" in the 18th century by enclosing commons, drilling seeds, planting turnips and attracting better tenants". It was landowners such as the Duke of Buccleuch at Newcastleton and Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk in Aberdeenshire who built villages to increase industry and rents.

The Highlands, meanwhile, had no villages at all prior to the Hanoverian government's decision to build roads and so open up the area after the Jacobite rebellions. Prior to this the traditional grouping was the "clachan or fermtoun" where three of four families shared the tenancy of a farm. Today Auchindrain on the Duke of Argyll's estate has been preserved as a museum to this old way of life, which persisted until the 1960s.

Yet it is the harshness of rural life that shines through the book, as the Argyllshire minister, the Rev Mr Macdougall, wrote in 1760: "Indolence was almost the only comfort they enjoyed. There was scarcely any variety of wretchedness with which they were not obliged to struggle, or rather to which they were not obliged to submit." Food was so short, they bled their cows to boil out and drink the blood.

The man who helped bring the traditional "English" village to the Highlands was the engineer Thomas Telford. Scotland in the middle of the 18th century was described by his biographer as "a country without roads, fields lying uncultivated, mines unexplored and all branches of industry languishing in the midst of an idle, miserable and haggard population." At the time the journey from Edinburgh to Inverness took eight days and travellers signed their wills before departure, so fearful were they of brigands.

In 1802 Telford was asked to conclude a survey of the required infrastructure of the Highlands and over the next 18 years he build 920 miles of roads and 1,200 bridges. Roads meant that no longer were women required to cart manure on their backs to the fields.

The fact remains that we have had too rosy a view of village life with its grinding poverty, cultural and intellectual isolation and the fact remains that what we have today is a vast improvement. Yet village life is on another cusp of change. While in 1950 the fulcrum swung away from an arable population who lived and worked the land towards what we have today - villages deserted by day as residents drive off to toil in the cities leaving behind the young and the retired. The advent of superfast broadband and home working could see this reversed.

As Mr Aslet writes: "Villages used to work for their livings; now they are often in the position of courtesans, kept for their looks by people who turn to them for comfort and recreation."