It’s easy enough to romanticise the English countryside: sparkling lakes and drystone walls; beech hangers and chalk hills; a place for everything and everything in its place.
On the other hand, rural life is frequently presented in its worst light too, as if there is somehow a need to balance the poetic idealism seen in glossy magazines or Escape to the Country. In this negative version, farming is on the rack, drug use and depression is rife, and regressive political views compete only with apathy.
As ever, there are germs of truth in both accounts – but there is also a less dramatic reality in between, evident in places you wouldn’t give a second glance to since they are neither stunningly beautiful nor scenes of rubber-necking ruination.
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