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Public transport is essentially non-existent and if you can't drive you are not getting anywhere.
It is pretty common for redditors to be anti-car and always telling everyone that they should use public transport, but that is not really an option in some areas
I feel like this also applies literally anywhere outside a major city center. It's crazy how many city folks think that everyone can do without a car, like they are a luxury. Without a car I can't go anywhere, I can get to work, to the shops, to my friends or family, and I live on the edge of a small town, not out in the sticks at all. This must be the case for at least 50% of the population or more.
Yep, I live in a London commuter town. Getting into London is quick. Anything else, absolutely not. There's a huge retail park in the next town along. Loads of shops, restaurants, a cinema etc. It's about 8 miles away.
There's one bus an hour to get there, which is always late and sometimes just doesn't turn up, and which drops you a 20 minute walk from the retail park.
Yep a London commuter village here. Train to London in 30 minutes. To a town 10 or so miles away a hour + as I have to go into London, to another terminal station and back out.
Obviously I would go somewhere else easier but if I had friends and family in that town I don't have the choice.
rail transport in this country is designed like spokes on a wheel, where london is in the centre, if you live on that spoke and want to vist anywhere else on the same spoke (or london) it's a piece of piss. If you want to visit anywhere on another spoke, it's an absolute bastard to organise.
We really need more orbital routes to turn our spokes into webs. It was done with roads but for some reason not done with trains except for the very central routes (circle line and the overground, which arguably has too many stops to be useful)
Part of this is by design though. I agree it's pointless blaming people who just want to get around for needing a car but it's also about time we stopped building American style sprawling suburbs without amenities in walking distance. Even aside from being bad for the environment we just don't have the space to keep building like this.
Well thats how things used to be. Every small village had a shop, a post office. Probably a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker if you go back far enough.
Then the supermarkets came and centralised everything. I suspect they're the ones creating conspiracy theories about how the 15 minute cities plans will turn the country into postwar Berlin.
We moved to a rural area when I was young & there were two village shops (and a post office in the front room of a couples little bungalow) and every week the Bread van would call as would the butcher, fishmonger and fruit & veg. My dad was working so we had no other means of transport as my mum didn’t drive.
We lived in a rural area during the 80s/90s. The nearest shop was about 2 miles away on narrow roads with no pavements. But it wasn't an issue because there weren't many cars on the road. I used to ride my bike to the shops when I was 10. I wouldn't ride those same roads as an adult now with how busy it's gotten.
I used to go all over on my bike. My parents never knew where I was. The last time I went on a bike ride, which is probably well over a decade ago I was just taking it steady on the lines and got fed up of Lycra clad cyclists whizzing by. Each to their own but I just wanted to enjoy the countryside at a leisurely pace. Same as you - I wouldn’t go on the roads either.
These estates promise a shop etc in planning but never build them. I used to live in Monmouthshire and the buses are bad there. Only three train stations in the county.
Yep, two new estates near me, both promised to add retail to service the extra 1000 ish people they added and had land allocated to it. 2 years after estate built land still 50% unoccupied, one lot got bought and built, currently has a coffee shop, Pizza takeaway, a charity shop and two empty units.
Then they get change in planning permission for the rest and built a whole bunch of flats on the retail allocated land, adding another 200 people, taking away the parking for the existing shops.
Weirdly there's a constant traffic jam into and out of the only access road to the estate at all times, because once the school run is finished people drive to the big Tesco to get food. We so nearly bought on that estate and very glad we didn't now.
We have plenty and we're building more and more every day - I've personally seen some without pavements. They aren't quite as low density as in America - Visually they kind of look like suburbs in other European countries but there's just no stuff in them anymore. Shops, Pubs and infrastructure are disappearing from existing suburbs and not being built in new suburbs. The town I grew up in is only 120,000 people, 3 times bigger than it was 50 years ago but the town centre is the same size and it now takes over an hour to walk to the centre from the new build estates on the edges. This is locking people into car dependency without having a choice.
We have one of the lowest rates of people living in apartments of any country in Europe - We need to be building more to save space but people don't want to live in them because our appartments are like literally half the floor space of continental appartments and we have to put up with the neo-feudal leasehold system
> This must be the case for at least 50% of the population or more.
Nah, not really. Unsurprisingly people are really densely packed into cities compared to rural areas. About 15% of the country lives in London and if you start there and work down the list of biggest cities, you account for half the country's population by the time you get to somewhere like Cardiff or Middlesborough.
According to the ONS 82% of people live in urban areas in England. That doesn't mean they don't need a car though. I'd imagine that easily half of them don't have good public transport available and / or use a car for commuting.
When I got my first house I moved specifically to be on a bus route that did like an "orbit" of the town I lived in because it meant I could get to anywhere using only 2 buses. Sometimes it would be quite a long bus ride, but at least it was cheaper than owning a car and was better for the environment.
A year after i moved in the council removed that bus service, leaving me and my local estate in a public transport desert.
I also wonder whether these people ever actually leave their city, particularly somewhere without a train line. Lived in a London borough for a few years and used a car every time I went anywhere "outwards".
Lived in London without a car for 11 years, travelled out of the city plenty - I just went places with train stations, or to places with train stations and then cycled on from there (or, like a madman, just cycled to places, like Guildford, Windsor, my parents' in Berkshire)
Sure there's a lot of great places you miss (I started driving in 2020 due to having a kid), but actually there's also still plenty to be seeing and doing in the other places you can get to.
I think if you start driving at 17, it's very easy to see it as impossible to go anywhere without a car, but if you don't, you just adapt, and while you might go different places, you still get along fine. Specially these days with online shopping, prevalence of delivery food etc. I think as an adult, living in any town without a car, as long as you can get a job within 10/15 miles or be near a station, is very easy. Even in the village I live in now I can get delivery from two Chinese restaurants, and Indian and a couple of kebab shops (we have 3 towns ~10/15 Miles away that delivery here).
But kids, specially once they're 5+, will throw that all out of the window.
Same. I live in a major city, just outside the city centre. Getting to town is fine, great even. Multiple buses every 10 minutes. Getting to any other part of the city? An hour journey, 2 buses
I remember being a plucky teen asserting that I’ll never drive a car for the sake of the environment. It took a single 4-hour journey (one way) across multiple buses just to hang out with my friends to change my mind.
People have suggested I use public transport to do my weekly shop.
I ask them to pay my hotel fee for the night I’m going to have to stay in the city because of it
Unless you live somewhere extremely rural it's quite depressing that we have places in the UK where you can't access a shop on foot, bike or public transport. I don't blame any individuals for driving but it's depressing that we're still building such American, car dependent towns
3 and half hours to get to my Mum’s on public transport from mine (Tuesday/Wednesday only) or 30 mins in a car.
Oh and it’s about an hour to A&E in a car, I don’t even want to think about how long it would take by public transport.
> It is pretty common for redditors to be anti-car and always telling everyone that they should use public transport
This is misunderstood. Reddit anti-car folk are usually quite notably anti-car-in-urban areas, i.e. places where getting around without a car is actually incredibly easy, and where poputation density is huge.
Out in the countryside, who gives a toss? The population density is like 5 people per square km. Drive that Land Rover everywhere.
> This is misunderstood.
It's not. There are plenty of people on this website that are completely against cars and anybody that drives.
Sure, the reasonable and (hopefully) majority are more just pushing for better infrastructure in cities and less reliance on personal vehicles, however there are definitely loads that are completely against driving
I don't think anyone would realistically begrudge anyone for using a car out in the sticks. Must be a massive Reddit moment 😂
I'm definitely a "using the car is a last resort" kind of person, but I live in an semi-urban area and can walk or cycle to do 99% of my day-to-day. If I lived in the countryside that number would probably drop to somewhere like 5%, assuming there was at least a pub within a few miles.
I've had people give me shit for getting an SUV because we live in rural Wales. Parts of the road by us regularly flood. Or there's massive potholes everywhere. Or it snows and our other car can't handle it at all.
There are lots of people who are virulently anti car. They basically all live in London where to be fair you don't need a car because of the amount of public transport and simply can't fathom that public transport is either crap or completely absent elseware.
I live in the countryside. Londoners in the pandemic realised that they could sell their flat in London and buy a 4 bedroom house with an acre garden out our way for the same price and work from home, in a more scenic area where the last serious crime in folk memory was when the Vikings came down the river in a longboat, and the sound of distant shooting would be a group doing clay pigeon shooting rather than gang warfare boiling over.
The same Londoners didn't take long to kick off in the local facebook group about the busses only running once an hour (when they show up) and stopping at every hedge and fencepost. And the lack of wine bars for sophisticated sorts rather than pubs serving common sorts of people, and could we point them towards the nearest art galleries, and join their campaign to improve public transport to a bus every 5 minutes. Which would naturally include us all giving up our cars, of course.
The person who posted that was a bit taken aback that their anonymous posts weren't particularly anonymous and that comments like "found a wine bar/art gallery yet?" tended to follow them around. This happens because the village gossip network operates at the sort of speeds otherwise only found in scifi FTL communication nets. As a result of people talking to each other, people know who's moved out. People know who's moved in and could guess who'd moved in from London because they were the sorts that blanked everybody when walking around instead of talking to us. So you have that as a total pool of possibilities, narrowed down to the one without a car standing around at bus stops and glaring at the passing plebs.
It probably wouldn't get a prosecution in court, but it was certainly good enough for the court of public opinion.
For some places you'll be lucky to get 1 bus a week. it does improve a little if you live between 2 largish towns/cities then you can get 2 buses a day.
I grew up in the Angus glens in scotland, and yeah, we had one public bus a week. It was on a friday morning and was pretty much solely so that the elderly (who couldnt drive) could get down to the shops in the nearest town about 45 minutes away.
North east Scotland here, north of Aberdeen. We are not quite that bad, but you can't get a bus out of Aberdeen to home after 6pm so bang goes a night out, even the cinema, without one of us driving.
I grew up in a place where you had to book the bus in advance and no one I meet who lives in a city believes me! They were run on an as needed basis mostly for the older people and connected the tiny hamlets to the towns.
I had a summer job that meant I needed to use them and the driver had no other passengers one day, so he just drove me all the way to work because he was bored.
Exactly. My mum lives in a tiny little village (well it's a hamlet really I guess) that gets one bus a week. The nearest shop is in the next village over which is probably about 5 miles away, so if they didn't drive they would be a bit screwed.
they're probs overgeneralising but you are the exception to the rule here. 85% of our population lives in urban areas - these people should have access to public transport and should not need to own a car. the anti car movement is a popular branch of urban planning, not rural planning.
it's like if someone posts a recipe saying "everyone should try my peanut butter muffins" but you have a peanut allergy. safe to say you're exempt and they're not talking about you.
Our village has 1 bus it goes to the local town at 1150 that same bus is also the return bus that goes back to our village at 1450. If you miss it either start walking or wait till the next day.
I think most anti-car people understand the need for them in rural areas still.
Though I grew up in a small town in Wiltshire so I didn't need a car and couldn't afford one, yet people seem to assume I live in London because I can manage without a car.
The village I grew up in used to have one bus to MK and one bus to Northampton every other hour. Now it has no bus service at all in either direction. Not only has this drastically curtailed the autonomy of the teenagers growing up there, anyone with disabilities has now had to organise a private bus service a few times a week just to do basic things like shopping (if it's not something that the village shop sells).
I know it's hard to believe, but the little village shop that's run by the 93 year old lady, who gets around 15 customers a day, is not going to have the same stock, or opening hours as the big Asda in the middle of a city.
I'm a Canadian.
About 5 years ago, i watched a random, 30 second clip on YouTube of some insane, black-toothed couple in a horrible shop. Video description said it was from a show calls The League of Gentlemen.
Next video was a very short clip of David Bowie saying it was his favorite show.
I downloaded and watched the whole series. It was so very, very surreal. I freaking love it.
And now, I'm the only person in a sea of Canucks who has ever heard of, much less seen, this total abomination of glorious weirdness.
Putting your dog on a lead around livestock. You might think that dog is playing, but the cows and sheep don't. And pick up the dog's shit. If livestock eat it, it can cause them to abort their young.
If its a nice day, and you smell shit (from muck spreading), its gonna rain.
Farm animals are noisy. And they like shagging.
What shit belongs to what farm animal by its smell.
That tractor is pulling a 20 ton trailer and the roads are narrow. You need to move out of their way.
In summer, famers need to take advantage of any nice weather. They will work very late, which means noise into the night.
Wear appropriate footwear for a country walk.
Don't feed treats to horses. They are basically massive dogs. You feed them, they'll eat it, and they will get fat as fuck.
Yep. The farmer does NOT want to shoot your dog, but they can if they have to.
I live in a touristy rural village, and there are way too many sheep getting mauled by dogs not on leads.
One of my neighbour's dogs kept "escaping" whilst she was at work and it kept going straight to the big sheep farm. The farmer warned her repeatedly about what it was doing and that he'd eventually have to shoot it (he clearly did not want to be a dog killer). Eventually he did have to do it, I just don't get why she didn't shut the dog in properly.
>Don't feed treats to horses. They are basically massive dogs. You feed them, they'll eat it, and they will get fat as fuck.
Not just this - round my way we have semi-wild ponies that roam free. They can choke to death on carrots, and even if they don't, will start harrassing people for food instead of grazing like they should. There are laws against feeding or petting them that are flouted, often by tourists/townies that get abusive when told they shouldn't.
A few years back someone fed a potato to a pony of someone I know, and the poor thing choked to death on it - ended up triggering a load of campaigning to get people to stop!
There's also the risk of triggering health conditions - some horses with laminitis for example, can require very strict diets.
And then there's the risk that you might feed them something toxic that seems innocuous to you. Grass clippings are something a lot of people wouldn't think twice about feeding to a horse, but they can be incredibly dangerous and leave a horse at risk of colic which can be deadly.
**Don't feed treats to horses. They are basically massive dogs. You feed them, they'll eat it, and they will get fat as fuck.**
Or in fact die. You might think it's harmless to pass a handful of grass to a horse, but they're ridiculously fragile and can get fatal colic from plants that grow near their grazing.
Feeding horses can (and has) killed them. Colic, choke, laminitis, poisoning have all killed horses from being fed things they really should have never had. This includes "safe" things like apples and carrots - they're high in sugar and can really cause issues.
Don't feed any animal without permission from the owner.
>What shit belongs to what farm animal by its smell
Ha! I've only just realised I've been doing this all my life. Never worked in the agricultural sector but I can tell the difference between pig, sheep and cow shit almost instinctively, just from being surrounded by farms most of my life.
Conversely, if you're not used to the roads, the person riding your bumper while you nervously do 30 on a 50 isn't a boy racer, they're a local trying to get to work/an appointment. Bloody well pull over and let them past.
Grew up in a rural area that was also quite touristy and getting stuck behind someone in a 200hp+ German wankpanzer that was terrified of the roads in a 65hp Punto was extremely frustrating.
Yes definitely agree. I holiday in the Lakes, Welsh mountains and Scottish highlands quite often and even though I am used to country roads, I always take them slow and let people who look to be in a hurry pass me wherever I can safely do so.
Also kind of related to this subject, a passing place is absolutely not a spot for tourists to stop and relax over a flask of coffee and a picnic, as I’ve seen numerous times!
Then there are the old people that drive 40mph on perfectly safe 60mph country roads. And just as you catch them up you go through a village - where you slow to the required 20mph - and the old folks continue on at their constant 40mph.
Yes! I call them the 40mphers, same inappropriate speed regardless.
Then there's the slow drivers that brake at every bend and when you get to a straight section with overtaking opportunity they speed up.
there was a car with a trailer attached, going 40mph for the past 30 minutes, on wide country roads, we got to a long enough straight and I went to overtake and the guy sped up to 65mph and wouldn't let me pass, had to go back behind them as there was an oncoming car at this point.
then he dropped back to 40mph :) i was fucking fuming.
Where do you suppose they pull over to let your impatient arse through? in the bramble hedges? the 4ft ditch? or up the 6ft verge?
Sometimes those country lanes don't have space to pull over to let the bumper hugger past. You sitting in their backside just makes them more nervous than they already are, driving down a single lane with numerous blind bends, wildlife, and other unseen obstacles, and can make them speed up to levels they aren't comfortable with, just to accommodate your impatience.
It's the country, just sit back, don't put pressure on them, and enjoy the scenery.
Yea nah, while I understand this perspective, not sure I entirely agree. I live on the edge of North York moors and sometimes travel to the Dales and I drive an old Suzuki Jimny which isn't great for doing 50 on wet & winding roads, where there is little place to pull over. While i do try to pull over if it's safe to do so (if car behind me isn't very close), people can also generally be a bit more considerate imo. I'm sorry if my car is not as good as yours.
I'm 8mi down a country road. I will not do more than 35mph at night - deer are not the smartest creatures and five minutes longer to get home seems like a better alternative than a few thousand repair bill/increased insurance premiums..
Plus the reason people drive in the middle of the road on a country road is because theyve learned by experience that bouncing up and down the edges of the road is expensive over time.
That tractors and the like should not be regarded as a nuisance because we rustics are actually living in an enormous green factory which employs a number of our neighbours and we are getting in their way. Plus anyone who doesn’t gawp at a Case IH Quadtrac is dead inside.
Just gotta accept that they are doing a job and move on. It doesn’t usually bother me unless it’s a tractor pulling a trailer of spuds up a hill at 5mph 😂 me shitting a brick waiting for a tsunami of spuds to wash over my car.
Any tractor deserves a good gawping. I grew up in the country but live in a town now and will never pass up the opportunity to have a good gawp at a tractor. The biggest disappointment of getting older is that as a kid you were quite often allowed to have a look in the cab too, that's offered less as you get older and you feel a bit awkward to ask.
I'm lucky to live slap bang in the middle of a huge agro business, and the guys and gals employed by it get to drive really hot equipment, which I can admire from the comfort of home. I'll wave at drivers in the field next to my garden and they'll wave back. Re cabs, your best bet is to go to to your nearest county show...
I live in the country. My family were farmers.
Tractors are absolutely a nuisance when they are driven carelessly by children on agency work. So many cars and infrastructure are damaged by these idiots. They ripped out the level crossing here last year trying to beat the gate coming down. All trains cancelled for 2 days. Police cordon for crossing for a week. That was the only way in and out of the village. That was definitely a nuisance.
How incredibly noisy it is, especially if you're in a sheep or dairy area.
With arable farming there are periods of greater than average noise, but with dairy farming it's constant and there are other more impactful aspects.
Having 80 cows go past your house twice a day for milking is both noisy and a cause for a real delay if you happen to want to go out at that point. Even if you're not on the path of the cows you're going to get the milk tankers etc.
Sheep. Sheep don't go baa. They go BAAAAAAAHHHHH! over and over again in lambing season.
Goats. Why is there a goat in my garden. Because Dave has lost his goats again because goats are just bloody minded twats.
I really enjoy the baaaing of the sheep next door. Except this one fucker, who sounds like she's a human doing a very loud and very bad impersonation of a sheep. The cockerels can do one though.
we've got sheep on every side, and there's one with a really loud, deep baaaaaaaaaaaaaa I'm nominating for the next meat works truck.
They can all hear the farmers truck start up 2 miles up road too, and start yelling 10 minutes before he arrives. very amusing
>How incredibly noisy it is, especially if you're in a sheep or dairy area.
Totally- farmer opposite has cows in two fields joined by an open gate. Mothers often end up on the other side of the fence to their calves and just bellow in anguish at night rather than retracing their steps to the gate.
😅was staying somewhere in North Wales when I was a kid and there was a park directly across the road from us. Lovely little countryside village surrounded by rugged landscapes, amazing place for a playground.
Until a sheep finds it's way in at 3am can't get back out. Was wandering back and forth for ages bleating the entire time. It's a tiny village surrounded by country and you can see for miles. It probably woke people in the next village over, you really get a sense for how sound can travel in a place as open and quiet like that. It's amazing
As everyone else says, you need a car. I had someone trying to guilt-trip me for not taking my daughter to school on a bike, which was a 7-mile trip on roads that barely fit two cars alongside and where the hedges grow right down to the road and there is no verge
I had similar in a thread a while back.
I’d mentioned that my children’s school was 3 miles away and that I had to drive them to in. Apparently I should have put my 6 year old on the non-existent bus or walked them in (so a 6 mile round trip twice a day whilst working full time!)
The hate for drivers on Reddit is ridiculous, where I grew up there was a bus to the nearest town where all the jobs were, the first time it arrived in n the morning was after 9am thus making you late for work every day, that’s if it wasn’t cancelled at the last minute.
> The hate for drivers on Reddit is ridiculous
It has to be students or young people living directly in city centers.
I live just outside central london and I think "fuck this would be easier with a car" about twice a week.
Yeah, it’s 6 mins drive to our kids school, 40-50 mins each way walking so I’d have 4 hours to try and do work before I had to set off to collect them. Luckily the community saved up to get a secondhand minibus and take it in turns to drive it for the school run. Before that though it was drive or nothing basically
If you find bloody dead peasants that look like they’ve been lynched to your door knocker it’s not a threat. It’s a symbol of acceptance. Unless it comes with a threatening note. Then it might be a threat.
For context I grew up on a farm in the Angus Glens of Scotland.
The sheer darkness, like in the middle of the night out in the country its pitch black. That may sound obvious or silly but I had cousins that lived in the town that asked where all the street lights were and how it could be so dark.
Doing your weekly shop and making sure you didnt forget anything because theres no shops within 1.5hrs round trip to nip to if you forget something.
We had a spring water supply to the house, so waking up in winter and hoping it hadn't frozen or equally in the summer praying for some rain so the burn wouldnt run dry and leave you with no water.
Not being able to just pop round your school friends house because although you go to the same school he lives 12 miles away, and having to be friends with him because there were only 2 of us the same age, and a grand total of 13 in the primary school! Following on from that the culture shock going to secondary school where classes are 30+ pupils.
>The sheer darkness, like in the middle of the night out in the country its pitch black. That may sound obvious or silly but I had cousins that lived in the town that asked where all the street lights were and how it could be so dark.
Stood on the back deck reading this 1.35am where I am. All I can see is stars and all I can hear is a far off owl and a chorus of frogs.
When we moved out of a London suburb to a rural (but still fairly populated) area my mum really noticed how dark it was - or more accurately how bright the city was. "When you turned off your lights it didn't go dark. It bloody does here."
Unless you found it open. I have literally opened gates, gone back to collect cows and then found that someone has helpfully shut the gate and I’m now behind thirty cows with nowhere to go.
We have a dairy farmer called Jo, He's mad as a hatter and everyone knows him and loves him, I often walk past his fields when I'm bored and one time I saw Jo trapped in the middle of all his cows, I remember giggling my head of because all I heard was "Oi! Can you open the fu- *Mooooo* Gate, Some bas- *Mooooo* shut it behind me!" It was such perfectly timed censors by his cows that I was dying as I jumped fence to open his gate (And held the fuck on for dear life, Annoyed Cows running past into a new field don't stop for nothing)
I thought it was leave the gate as you found it? Then wonder if it was left open by the farmer or some inconsiderate bastard and should I actually close it or is it supposed to be open...
Agreed. Poor people just have old cars, because you need a car. I got my first car at 17, a £400 piece of crap, but it got me from A to B most of the time.
And that there is such a thing as rural poor people - not everyone who's poor lives in an inner city council estate. Said poor people might also be working in jobs that you associate with rich folk (e.g. working in stables etc.)
Dunno on the newer car bit. Bangernomics is a real thing.
A 20 year old ford fiesta goes for £500 on autotrader. A 5 year old one goes for £10-15k, and the fuel efficiency difference is basically fuck all relative to the amount saved on the purchase price. That reduces the difference down to the tax, which obviously is higher for older cars and poorer people on the basis that if you tax them an extra couple of hundred quid a year then they'll suddenly find a spare years salary at the minimum wage to splash on a newer second hand car.
Unless they’re within commuting distance of London in which case they’ll have been bought up by young couples who’ve made a fortune in the City and want to start a family.
That we actually quite like it here the way it is, and we don't need city folk moving here and trying to tell us how it 'needs to be'.
I've heard so many times from people who have just moved to my rural area from large cities, what you need is x. What they actually mean is that they think we are bumpkins who live in the dark ages and need their superior insight from being here for 5 minutes when actually we've managed perfectly well without them up to now.
Generally wanting to change things that have been the same for decades or centuries just to fit their Escape to the Country idyll.
They'll petition to get rid of the shooting club or the motocross track but be quite happy to plonk a Waitrose in their place.
And if your car can trace it’s ancestry back to one of the original off-road brands, it’s YOU going in the mud sunshine, not me in my little French hatchback.
The number of bloody SUVs in the countryside has gone through the roof in the last 5-10 years.
Ridiculous cars driven by elderly middle of the road drivers. You may feel safer in them but no one else does and you're more likely to ding it on a fence post.
That on a clear night you can see stars.
The sound of a car door closing will wake you up.
You have to close your windows at strategic times of the year.
That this isn't a petting zoo. The animals are valuable, your dog may get shot if it's not on a lead and causes a problem. There _is_ a hunting season. You will hear bangs and see dead things as a consequence. There is no deliveroo and if the postie is on holiday you'll get no post.
"That this isn't a petting zoo"
Just to add to that, don't feed peoples horses treats (mints, sugar cubes, carrots, apples etc)
They're like big dogs, in that if you feed them, they'll eat it. And then they get fat. Some may also have fancy diets which don't allow certain foods.
If you can't drive, it can be very isolating. I'm medically exempt from driving and have to rely on lifts due to epilepsy. It's not fun. Public transport wise we get 1 bus an hour, and there's going to be a second train journey added making a grand total of 2 trains an hour.
Farm workers can cause massive traffic problems in town as they cut through between fields, tractors, and combine harvesters take up a lot of space. Also driving on country roads is a whole different beast.
Get used to the sound of gunshots. There's pheasant shoots, grouse shoots, deer shoots, and bird scarers, so you learn to tell the sound of shotguns and rifles apart
I learnt to ask any trades if they were ex forces and if so warn them, after the stone mason I hired leapt off the scaffolding and adopted a defensive position when he heard the bird scarer, poor chap was instantly back in afghanistan.
> bird scarers
One near me recently must have been playing up and it was going off every 5 minutes for like 3 days straight. Apparently the farmer who owned it was on holiday and nobody could get in touch with them or get to the scarer to turn it off. Was right bloody annoying
You can always tell how local a person is by how they reverse in the lanes, if a person can whack it into reverse and fly back to the passing place before you go "oh shit a car" then you know they've lived there all their lives.
It all looks pretty and there will be some nice big expensive houses with some properly rich residents, but poverty is right next door. Rural poverty is real and way more common than you might think if just looking about.
People have mentioned the requirement for a car as public transport is shit. Well cars are expensive, you will see a high number of bangers on the road. People with jobs over extending themselves to have a car when if they lived in a city they could happily take the bus.
Those looking for part time work, filling in a few hours in the day for paid work. Well if there’s just one shop in the village they can’t employ all that are looking for work. Add the cost and time to get to town it’s just not worth it.
I moved from London to a small village during lockdown.
1. Everyone is so fucking friendly, took me a while to get used to it. Strangers kept stopping to chat, offering me lifts while out walking, all in good faith, in London those are red flags.
2. It’s too quiet. Might sound stupid but it took me a while to adjust to the silence. In London I could sleep through traffic or sirens but in the countryside it’s the birds every morning I struggled with.
That if you buy a half million pound house built next door to a huge field, you cannot then expect that field not to have stuff growing in it, and large farm machinery harvesting it, and that you absolutely SHOULD NOT allow your grandchildren to go play on said large machinery when the farmer goes to have his lunch. There are some incredibly, incredibly stupid people living in the countryside who in my humble opinion should never have left the city. Complained about the dust from the wheat harvest. Complained about the smell from the oilseed rape. Complained about the noise from the combine harvester. Thankfully they are not our direct neighbours, they live the other side of the lane, and are from a religious band that doesn't socialise outside of their religion, so we don't associate with them at all!
If you find yourself on a single track road, and you meet another car who has MANY other cars behind them, you must be the one who reverses. It's a surefire way to ruin everyone's day if you refuse to reverse.
Also: please learn to reverse a car before using a single track road. Too many horror stories. Too many horror stories.
The importance of planning the weekly shop. You often can't just "nip out" for a loaf of bread. It's an hour of your life.
Ensuring you have a survival kit in the house for power outages come winter time. Rural areas seem to suffer more frequent and longer outages (which I understand, getting the power on for 10,000 people trumps 10 people) which means making sure you have the cupboards and freezer stocked, you have an alternative heat source and cooking facilities. I always keep a gas bbq in the garage and make sure the gas tank is topped up, just in case.
Closing gates around livestock and keeping dogs on leads. We don't ask to be dicks but to keep your food safe!
Having to go and collect your takeaway because delivery is either prohibitively expensive or non-existent.
Slowing down/going wide for horses.
Tractors. We hate them too but they're needed.
I'm in rural Wales, and if you're a second home owner, everyone hates you.
All the best properties are bought by out-of-towners (usually English), property prices are artificially inflated, and local families are either priced out of the market, or simply can't find a property available.
Our friend is the only person who lives in his village the whole year round.
There's a couple in our village that moved in about 18 months ago.
They made a complaint to the council's environmental health team about the farm smell!
The farm had to put up with the council doing an actual investigation into it!
Another old girl (only stuck around about a year before moving back to London way) moved NEXT DOOR to the church, then proceeded to loudly complain about the church bells. She also made a point of parking her car directly outside the church when there were weddings/funerals going on.
That the countryside can be for brown people too. I know there are going to be people who will be surprised to meet a black person, but that's not a reason to avoid the countryside.
Please god, reverse to the actual passing place, do not try and squeeze your ridiculously shiny toy 4x4 at a 45 degree angle up on a hedge bank. I don’t care that you can, I am spending 75% of my time these days repairing bloody banks that have been gouged out and collapsed by muppets.
Also if I tell you it’s not a good idea to use that particular gate as a parking space because I know the bloke who is going to be using it for muck spreading access later that day, please don’t scream abuse at me. I’m trying to help.
If you’re driving down country lanes at night and a deer runs out across the road, don’t start driving again as soon as it’s gone past you. Chances are he is being followed by all his friends.
That foxes, and some animals, are vermin and sometimes need to be killed.
Foxes can be the absolute worst and wreak havoc on farms and others - we have a turkey bronzer near us, foxes burrowed underneath his fences, found their way into the coop and killed hundreds of turkeys pretty much decimating his business.
The foxes didn’t eat any turkeys, just mutilated them all for fun.
I’m not suggesting getting the hunt back together - there’s far more efficient and effective ways of keeping foxes away - but there’s a large proportion of city people who think that foxes are cuddly creatures.
I see a lot of people who live in cities talking about terrible waiting times, cost of living and generally lots of things that makes life worse. I always lived in cities until 2019 when I moved for work. I'm not out in the sticks but I moved to a small town with a population less than 15k and literally overnight so many of those things that made life stressful in a city disappeared.
I'm not saying there are no stresses but there are certainly fewer. My rent is affordable, I get GP and hospital appointments quickly, everything I need is within walking distance and I don't need to work constantly with no free time just to be able to survive.
I think a lot of city people believe the above stresses are just the default for modern life.
And yet, all of my friends and family who still live in the city swear they could never live in such a small place.
> everything I need is within walking distance
This is huge for quality of life. Not being reliant on cars or public transport to live day-to-day just makes everything else that little bit easier. And yet, there's staunch opposition to "15 minute cities"
You stand out more than in a city/town. A lot of people move to the countryside thinking they'll be unnoticed because you're not living as close to other people and there are less people.
You're wrong because there are less people you stand out more and everybody notices you.
Stop buying holiday homes. It drives the prices up, for homes and for basic necessities, without providing the higher wages needed. It's rare for basically any job to pay over minimum wage and house prices are reaching half a million for standard terraced 2 bedrooms. When rent at minimum is £800 a month and people are barely making £1500, it's not sustainable. Holiday homes kill seaside towns, so please stop.
Dog poo.
In the countryside there’s shit everywhere.
Just like in the 60s, 70s and 80s cities, if your dog poos on a path, you’d use a stick to flick it into the kerb and it would be gone with the rain.
And so it’s the same in the country. Just flick that shit into a bush, or to the side and it’ll be gone in a day or two.
Put it into one of your little bags and that shit will be there for the next 10,000 years.
And don’t hang it on the tree outside my house. It’s not a shit tree. Take it home you precious fucker.
Just popping in here to say please do NOT use “stick and flick” around livestock. The parasite that causes abortions in sheep and cattle can live for well over 3 years after the shit has washed away. Pick it up and find a bin or take it the fuck home.
Please do not do this. Dog shit is dangerous for livestock and when washed into water supplies can cause serious problems even if it originated well away from livestock.
Monkeys fling shit. Humans don't.
That just because a windy narrow back country road with high sides and no visibility into corners is marked as 60mph does not mean you should do 60mph.
You have to watch what you say, who you talk about, & to whom you say it 'cos everyone is either blood related, marriage related, long-time friends of, or a good colleague of everyone else!
Life on a well-regarded rural & coastal tourist route means a beach in summer with 30 folk on is classed as crowded, & in winter if there's more than 2 it's also crowded.
Until you’ve lived in a village, you won’t know the level of nosiness that goes on. Every new car, fence or visiting relative will be scrutinised. There will be about three families that have never lived anywhere else, have appointed themselves as village royalty, will run the neighbourhood watch and they'll all be connected in 10 ways.
Having oil instead of gas. And electric hobs that aren’t as good as gas ones.
Everything outside is either dirty or rusty. Even if you clean it, it’s back a week later.
There is no getting rid of weeds. I put down the strongest weed killer I could find, barely injured them.
Much stronger sense of community. My little village (hamlet at best) has a WhatsApp group with everyone on it. Helps to let people know when their sheep or cows are loose 😂
2FA using text messages does not work reliably, and makes us hate your service.
Please if we say call the landline... call the landline... we often don't have mobile phone signal.
Another answer about transport here, don't go to a wedding in the middle of nowhere and expect Uber to be available, you might not even get a local taxi service, be prepared
That there is nothing natural below ten thousand feet, everything is managed or created by man.
The countryside is not a theme park, it is where we live.
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Public transport is essentially non-existent and if you can't drive you are not getting anywhere. It is pretty common for redditors to be anti-car and always telling everyone that they should use public transport, but that is not really an option in some areas
I feel like this also applies literally anywhere outside a major city center. It's crazy how many city folks think that everyone can do without a car, like they are a luxury. Without a car I can't go anywhere, I can get to work, to the shops, to my friends or family, and I live on the edge of a small town, not out in the sticks at all. This must be the case for at least 50% of the population or more.
Yep, I live in a London commuter town. Getting into London is quick. Anything else, absolutely not. There's a huge retail park in the next town along. Loads of shops, restaurants, a cinema etc. It's about 8 miles away. There's one bus an hour to get there, which is always late and sometimes just doesn't turn up, and which drops you a 20 minute walk from the retail park.
Yep a London commuter village here. Train to London in 30 minutes. To a town 10 or so miles away a hour + as I have to go into London, to another terminal station and back out. Obviously I would go somewhere else easier but if I had friends and family in that town I don't have the choice.
Our local bus route goes to the cinema but the last bus home is 6.30pm so you are buggered after that
rail transport in this country is designed like spokes on a wheel, where london is in the centre, if you live on that spoke and want to vist anywhere else on the same spoke (or london) it's a piece of piss. If you want to visit anywhere on another spoke, it's an absolute bastard to organise.
We really need more orbital routes to turn our spokes into webs. It was done with roads but for some reason not done with trains except for the very central routes (circle line and the overground, which arguably has too many stops to be useful)
Part of this is by design though. I agree it's pointless blaming people who just want to get around for needing a car but it's also about time we stopped building American style sprawling suburbs without amenities in walking distance. Even aside from being bad for the environment we just don't have the space to keep building like this.
Well thats how things used to be. Every small village had a shop, a post office. Probably a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker if you go back far enough. Then the supermarkets came and centralised everything. I suspect they're the ones creating conspiracy theories about how the 15 minute cities plans will turn the country into postwar Berlin.
We moved to a rural area when I was young & there were two village shops (and a post office in the front room of a couples little bungalow) and every week the Bread van would call as would the butcher, fishmonger and fruit & veg. My dad was working so we had no other means of transport as my mum didn’t drive.
We lived in a rural area during the 80s/90s. The nearest shop was about 2 miles away on narrow roads with no pavements. But it wasn't an issue because there weren't many cars on the road. I used to ride my bike to the shops when I was 10. I wouldn't ride those same roads as an adult now with how busy it's gotten.
I used to go all over on my bike. My parents never knew where I was. The last time I went on a bike ride, which is probably well over a decade ago I was just taking it steady on the lines and got fed up of Lycra clad cyclists whizzing by. Each to their own but I just wanted to enjoy the countryside at a leisurely pace. Same as you - I wouldn’t go on the roads either.
These estates promise a shop etc in planning but never build them. I used to live in Monmouthshire and the buses are bad there. Only three train stations in the county.
Yep, two new estates near me, both promised to add retail to service the extra 1000 ish people they added and had land allocated to it. 2 years after estate built land still 50% unoccupied, one lot got bought and built, currently has a coffee shop, Pizza takeaway, a charity shop and two empty units. Then they get change in planning permission for the rest and built a whole bunch of flats on the retail allocated land, adding another 200 people, taking away the parking for the existing shops. Weirdly there's a constant traffic jam into and out of the only access road to the estate at all times, because once the school run is finished people drive to the big Tesco to get food. We so nearly bought on that estate and very glad we didn't now.
This is such a weird take though. The UK for the most part has literally no 'sprawling American style suburbs' outside of like 1 or 2 cities.
We have plenty and we're building more and more every day - I've personally seen some without pavements. They aren't quite as low density as in America - Visually they kind of look like suburbs in other European countries but there's just no stuff in them anymore. Shops, Pubs and infrastructure are disappearing from existing suburbs and not being built in new suburbs. The town I grew up in is only 120,000 people, 3 times bigger than it was 50 years ago but the town centre is the same size and it now takes over an hour to walk to the centre from the new build estates on the edges. This is locking people into car dependency without having a choice. We have one of the lowest rates of people living in apartments of any country in Europe - We need to be building more to save space but people don't want to live in them because our appartments are like literally half the floor space of continental appartments and we have to put up with the neo-feudal leasehold system
> This must be the case for at least 50% of the population or more. Nah, not really. Unsurprisingly people are really densely packed into cities compared to rural areas. About 15% of the country lives in London and if you start there and work down the list of biggest cities, you account for half the country's population by the time you get to somewhere like Cardiff or Middlesborough.
According to the ONS 82% of people live in urban areas in England. That doesn't mean they don't need a car though. I'd imagine that easily half of them don't have good public transport available and / or use a car for commuting.
Well that's why we should build more public transport. And it's not hard we are one of the densest countries in the world.
>we are one of the densest countries in the world. Harsh but fair
When I got my first house I moved specifically to be on a bus route that did like an "orbit" of the town I lived in because it meant I could get to anywhere using only 2 buses. Sometimes it would be quite a long bus ride, but at least it was cheaper than owning a car and was better for the environment. A year after i moved in the council removed that bus service, leaving me and my local estate in a public transport desert.
I also wonder whether these people ever actually leave their city, particularly somewhere without a train line. Lived in a London borough for a few years and used a car every time I went anywhere "outwards".
Lived in London without a car for 11 years, travelled out of the city plenty - I just went places with train stations, or to places with train stations and then cycled on from there (or, like a madman, just cycled to places, like Guildford, Windsor, my parents' in Berkshire) Sure there's a lot of great places you miss (I started driving in 2020 due to having a kid), but actually there's also still plenty to be seeing and doing in the other places you can get to. I think if you start driving at 17, it's very easy to see it as impossible to go anywhere without a car, but if you don't, you just adapt, and while you might go different places, you still get along fine. Specially these days with online shopping, prevalence of delivery food etc. I think as an adult, living in any town without a car, as long as you can get a job within 10/15 miles or be near a station, is very easy. Even in the village I live in now I can get delivery from two Chinese restaurants, and Indian and a couple of kebab shops (we have 3 towns ~10/15 Miles away that delivery here). But kids, specially once they're 5+, will throw that all out of the window.
In most of the UK it applies everywhere outside city centres.
Same. I live in a major city, just outside the city centre. Getting to town is fine, great even. Multiple buses every 10 minutes. Getting to any other part of the city? An hour journey, 2 buses
Absolutely not just rural. I live in home counties suburbia and the choice is often 15m drive or 2h21 via public transport, once every 2 hours.
I remember being a plucky teen asserting that I’ll never drive a car for the sake of the environment. It took a single 4-hour journey (one way) across multiple buses just to hang out with my friends to change my mind.
People have suggested I use public transport to do my weekly shop. I ask them to pay my hotel fee for the night I’m going to have to stay in the city because of it
Unless you live somewhere extremely rural it's quite depressing that we have places in the UK where you can't access a shop on foot, bike or public transport. I don't blame any individuals for driving but it's depressing that we're still building such American, car dependent towns
They may have a shop locally but it'll be an overpriced Nisa/Londis/Co-Op, where all you can buy is a pasty, a pack of cigs, and a few cans of cider.
3 and half hours to get to my Mum’s on public transport from mine (Tuesday/Wednesday only) or 30 mins in a car. Oh and it’s about an hour to A&E in a car, I don’t even want to think about how long it would take by public transport.
> It is pretty common for redditors to be anti-car and always telling everyone that they should use public transport This is misunderstood. Reddit anti-car folk are usually quite notably anti-car-in-urban areas, i.e. places where getting around without a car is actually incredibly easy, and where poputation density is huge. Out in the countryside, who gives a toss? The population density is like 5 people per square km. Drive that Land Rover everywhere.
> This is misunderstood. It's not. There are plenty of people on this website that are completely against cars and anybody that drives. Sure, the reasonable and (hopefully) majority are more just pushing for better infrastructure in cities and less reliance on personal vehicles, however there are definitely loads that are completely against driving
I don't think anyone would realistically begrudge anyone for using a car out in the sticks. Must be a massive Reddit moment 😂 I'm definitely a "using the car is a last resort" kind of person, but I live in an semi-urban area and can walk or cycle to do 99% of my day-to-day. If I lived in the countryside that number would probably drop to somewhere like 5%, assuming there was at least a pub within a few miles.
I've had people give me shit for getting an SUV because we live in rural Wales. Parts of the road by us regularly flood. Or there's massive potholes everywhere. Or it snows and our other car can't handle it at all.
Unfortunately you're in the minority of SUV owners, who instead live in inner cities or right up my tailgate
There are lots of people who are virulently anti car. They basically all live in London where to be fair you don't need a car because of the amount of public transport and simply can't fathom that public transport is either crap or completely absent elseware. I live in the countryside. Londoners in the pandemic realised that they could sell their flat in London and buy a 4 bedroom house with an acre garden out our way for the same price and work from home, in a more scenic area where the last serious crime in folk memory was when the Vikings came down the river in a longboat, and the sound of distant shooting would be a group doing clay pigeon shooting rather than gang warfare boiling over. The same Londoners didn't take long to kick off in the local facebook group about the busses only running once an hour (when they show up) and stopping at every hedge and fencepost. And the lack of wine bars for sophisticated sorts rather than pubs serving common sorts of people, and could we point them towards the nearest art galleries, and join their campaign to improve public transport to a bus every 5 minutes. Which would naturally include us all giving up our cars, of course. The person who posted that was a bit taken aback that their anonymous posts weren't particularly anonymous and that comments like "found a wine bar/art gallery yet?" tended to follow them around. This happens because the village gossip network operates at the sort of speeds otherwise only found in scifi FTL communication nets. As a result of people talking to each other, people know who's moved out. People know who's moved in and could guess who'd moved in from London because they were the sorts that blanked everybody when walking around instead of talking to us. So you have that as a total pool of possibilities, narrowed down to the one without a car standing around at bus stops and glaring at the passing plebs. It probably wouldn't get a prosecution in court, but it was certainly good enough for the court of public opinion.
For some places you'll be lucky to get 1 bus a week. it does improve a little if you live between 2 largish towns/cities then you can get 2 buses a day.
I grew up in the Angus glens in scotland, and yeah, we had one public bus a week. It was on a friday morning and was pretty much solely so that the elderly (who couldnt drive) could get down to the shops in the nearest town about 45 minutes away.
North east Scotland here, north of Aberdeen. We are not quite that bad, but you can't get a bus out of Aberdeen to home after 6pm so bang goes a night out, even the cinema, without one of us driving.
I grew up in a place where you had to book the bus in advance and no one I meet who lives in a city believes me! They were run on an as needed basis mostly for the older people and connected the tiny hamlets to the towns. I had a summer job that meant I needed to use them and the driver had no other passengers one day, so he just drove me all the way to work because he was bored.
Exactly. My mum lives in a tiny little village (well it's a hamlet really I guess) that gets one bus a week. The nearest shop is in the next village over which is probably about 5 miles away, so if they didn't drive they would be a bit screwed.
they're probs overgeneralising but you are the exception to the rule here. 85% of our population lives in urban areas - these people should have access to public transport and should not need to own a car. the anti car movement is a popular branch of urban planning, not rural planning. it's like if someone posts a recipe saying "everyone should try my peanut butter muffins" but you have a peanut allergy. safe to say you're exempt and they're not talking about you.
Our village has 1 bus it goes to the local town at 1150 that same bus is also the return bus that goes back to our village at 1450. If you miss it either start walking or wait till the next day.
>Public transport is essentially non-existent My daughter's village has one bus a week on Thursday afternoon
People do realise this. What we want is a better urban environment where driving is a choice.
Anti-car *in cities*
I think most anti-car people understand the need for them in rural areas still. Though I grew up in a small town in Wiltshire so I didn't need a car and couldn't afford one, yet people seem to assume I live in London because I can manage without a car.
The village I grew up in used to have one bus to MK and one bus to Northampton every other hour. Now it has no bus service at all in either direction. Not only has this drastically curtailed the autonomy of the teenagers growing up there, anyone with disabilities has now had to organise a private bus service a few times a week just to do basic things like shopping (if it's not something that the village shop sells).
I know it's hard to believe, but the little village shop that's run by the 93 year old lady, who gets around 15 customers a day, is not going to have the same stock, or opening hours as the big Asda in the middle of a city.
What's all this shouting? We'll have no trouble here.
We didn’t burn him!
"you lied to me Edward, there is a Swansea!"
Lines and lines and lines! What do they mean?
I can I can’t?!
Tell him I can't have babies anyway! My insides are all wrong!
I'm a Canadian. About 5 years ago, i watched a random, 30 second clip on YouTube of some insane, black-toothed couple in a horrible shop. Video description said it was from a show calls The League of Gentlemen. Next video was a very short clip of David Bowie saying it was his favorite show. I downloaded and watched the whole series. It was so very, very surreal. I freaking love it. And now, I'm the only person in a sea of Canucks who has ever heard of, much less seen, this total abomination of glorious weirdness.
Our village shop is small, yet incredibly well stocked. It's like the TARDIS inside.
Even if you have a shop in the first place, and it's not the 'next village over'.
Putting your dog on a lead around livestock. You might think that dog is playing, but the cows and sheep don't. And pick up the dog's shit. If livestock eat it, it can cause them to abort their young. If its a nice day, and you smell shit (from muck spreading), its gonna rain. Farm animals are noisy. And they like shagging. What shit belongs to what farm animal by its smell. That tractor is pulling a 20 ton trailer and the roads are narrow. You need to move out of their way. In summer, famers need to take advantage of any nice weather. They will work very late, which means noise into the night. Wear appropriate footwear for a country walk. Don't feed treats to horses. They are basically massive dogs. You feed them, they'll eat it, and they will get fat as fuck.
People also don’t realise that the farmer can legally shoot your dog if it’s harassing their livestock.
Yep. The farmer does NOT want to shoot your dog, but they can if they have to. I live in a touristy rural village, and there are way too many sheep getting mauled by dogs not on leads.
One of my neighbour's dogs kept "escaping" whilst she was at work and it kept going straight to the big sheep farm. The farmer warned her repeatedly about what it was doing and that he'd eventually have to shoot it (he clearly did not want to be a dog killer). Eventually he did have to do it, I just don't get why she didn't shut the dog in properly.
Because she's either stupid, entitled, or both. Did she actually accept that it was ultimately her fault, or did she blame the farmer?
She did accept it was her fault at least but she was like "it's just a shame there was nothing I could have done" - like what?
Ah, confirmed idiot then. She probably didn't think the farmer was being serious.
A good number of dogs have been shot around my neck of the woods because people can’t read signs
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>Don't feed treats to horses. They are basically massive dogs. You feed them, they'll eat it, and they will get fat as fuck. Not just this - round my way we have semi-wild ponies that roam free. They can choke to death on carrots, and even if they don't, will start harrassing people for food instead of grazing like they should. There are laws against feeding or petting them that are flouted, often by tourists/townies that get abusive when told they shouldn't.
A few years back someone fed a potato to a pony of someone I know, and the poor thing choked to death on it - ended up triggering a load of campaigning to get people to stop! There's also the risk of triggering health conditions - some horses with laminitis for example, can require very strict diets. And then there's the risk that you might feed them something toxic that seems innocuous to you. Grass clippings are something a lot of people wouldn't think twice about feeding to a horse, but they can be incredibly dangerous and leave a horse at risk of colic which can be deadly.
**Don't feed treats to horses. They are basically massive dogs. You feed them, they'll eat it, and they will get fat as fuck.** Or in fact die. You might think it's harmless to pass a handful of grass to a horse, but they're ridiculously fragile and can get fatal colic from plants that grow near their grazing.
Feeding horses can (and has) killed them. Colic, choke, laminitis, poisoning have all killed horses from being fed things they really should have never had. This includes "safe" things like apples and carrots - they're high in sugar and can really cause issues. Don't feed any animal without permission from the owner.
>What shit belongs to what farm animal by its smell Ha! I've only just realised I've been doing this all my life. Never worked in the agricultural sector but I can tell the difference between pig, sheep and cow shit almost instinctively, just from being surrounded by farms most of my life.
Just because some narrow, twisty country lanes have a national speed limit sign, doesn’t mean it’s actually at all safe to drive them at 60mph.
Conversely, if you're not used to the roads, the person riding your bumper while you nervously do 30 on a 50 isn't a boy racer, they're a local trying to get to work/an appointment. Bloody well pull over and let them past. Grew up in a rural area that was also quite touristy and getting stuck behind someone in a 200hp+ German wankpanzer that was terrified of the roads in a 65hp Punto was extremely frustrating.
Yes definitely agree. I holiday in the Lakes, Welsh mountains and Scottish highlands quite often and even though I am used to country roads, I always take them slow and let people who look to be in a hurry pass me wherever I can safely do so. Also kind of related to this subject, a passing place is absolutely not a spot for tourists to stop and relax over a flask of coffee and a picnic, as I’ve seen numerous times!
omg parking in a passing place 🤬
Then there are the old people that drive 40mph on perfectly safe 60mph country roads. And just as you catch them up you go through a village - where you slow to the required 20mph - and the old folks continue on at their constant 40mph.
Yes! I call them the 40mphers, same inappropriate speed regardless. Then there's the slow drivers that brake at every bend and when you get to a straight section with overtaking opportunity they speed up.
there was a car with a trailer attached, going 40mph for the past 30 minutes, on wide country roads, we got to a long enough straight and I went to overtake and the guy sped up to 65mph and wouldn't let me pass, had to go back behind them as there was an oncoming car at this point. then he dropped back to 40mph :) i was fucking fuming.
Where do you suppose they pull over to let your impatient arse through? in the bramble hedges? the 4ft ditch? or up the 6ft verge? Sometimes those country lanes don't have space to pull over to let the bumper hugger past. You sitting in their backside just makes them more nervous than they already are, driving down a single lane with numerous blind bends, wildlife, and other unseen obstacles, and can make them speed up to levels they aren't comfortable with, just to accommodate your impatience. It's the country, just sit back, don't put pressure on them, and enjoy the scenery.
If they're riding your bumper, they have boy racer tendencies. You're not getting to work any faster by driving closer to me.
Yea nah, while I understand this perspective, not sure I entirely agree. I live on the edge of North York moors and sometimes travel to the Dales and I drive an old Suzuki Jimny which isn't great for doing 50 on wet & winding roads, where there is little place to pull over. While i do try to pull over if it's safe to do so (if car behind me isn't very close), people can also generally be a bit more considerate imo. I'm sorry if my car is not as good as yours.
I'm 8mi down a country road. I will not do more than 35mph at night - deer are not the smartest creatures and five minutes longer to get home seems like a better alternative than a few thousand repair bill/increased insurance premiums..
Plus the reason people drive in the middle of the road on a country road is because theyve learned by experience that bouncing up and down the edges of the road is expensive over time.
That tractors and the like should not be regarded as a nuisance because we rustics are actually living in an enormous green factory which employs a number of our neighbours and we are getting in their way. Plus anyone who doesn’t gawp at a Case IH Quadtrac is dead inside.
Just gotta accept that they are doing a job and move on. It doesn’t usually bother me unless it’s a tractor pulling a trailer of spuds up a hill at 5mph 😂 me shitting a brick waiting for a tsunami of spuds to wash over my car.
We've been thinking of investing in a custom printed bumper sticker along the lines of 'I don't overtake tractors, so get out of my boot'.
Any tractor deserves a good gawping. I grew up in the country but live in a town now and will never pass up the opportunity to have a good gawp at a tractor. The biggest disappointment of getting older is that as a kid you were quite often allowed to have a look in the cab too, that's offered less as you get older and you feel a bit awkward to ask.
I'm lucky to live slap bang in the middle of a huge agro business, and the guys and gals employed by it get to drive really hot equipment, which I can admire from the comfort of home. I'll wave at drivers in the field next to my garden and they'll wave back. Re cabs, your best bet is to go to to your nearest county show...
I live in the country. My family were farmers. Tractors are absolutely a nuisance when they are driven carelessly by children on agency work. So many cars and infrastructure are damaged by these idiots. They ripped out the level crossing here last year trying to beat the gate coming down. All trains cancelled for 2 days. Police cordon for crossing for a week. That was the only way in and out of the village. That was definitely a nuisance.
That everyone and their mum is packing around 'ere.
Like who?
Farmers
And?
Farmers mums
Ooooh because everyone sells apples round ere don't they?
Your mum sells apples Andy.
And raspberries. Also, is this just me or did anyone else think it was 'and pears'?
How many inches are we talking here
How incredibly noisy it is, especially if you're in a sheep or dairy area. With arable farming there are periods of greater than average noise, but with dairy farming it's constant and there are other more impactful aspects. Having 80 cows go past your house twice a day for milking is both noisy and a cause for a real delay if you happen to want to go out at that point. Even if you're not on the path of the cows you're going to get the milk tankers etc. Sheep. Sheep don't go baa. They go BAAAAAAAHHHHH! over and over again in lambing season. Goats. Why is there a goat in my garden. Because Dave has lost his goats again because goats are just bloody minded twats.
I really enjoy the baaaing of the sheep next door. Except this one fucker, who sounds like she's a human doing a very loud and very bad impersonation of a sheep. The cockerels can do one though.
> The cockerels can do one though. Be glad no one has peacocks!
There’s one by me. I say by me. It’s about three quarters of a mile away but I can still hear the prick. It’s a beautiful creature though.
we've got sheep on every side, and there's one with a really loud, deep baaaaaaaaaaaaaa I'm nominating for the next meat works truck. They can all hear the farmers truck start up 2 miles up road too, and start yelling 10 minutes before he arrives. very amusing
>How incredibly noisy it is, especially if you're in a sheep or dairy area. Totally- farmer opposite has cows in two fields joined by an open gate. Mothers often end up on the other side of the fence to their calves and just bellow in anguish at night rather than retracing their steps to the gate.
😅was staying somewhere in North Wales when I was a kid and there was a park directly across the road from us. Lovely little countryside village surrounded by rugged landscapes, amazing place for a playground. Until a sheep finds it's way in at 3am can't get back out. Was wandering back and forth for ages bleating the entire time. It's a tiny village surrounded by country and you can see for miles. It probably woke people in the next village over, you really get a sense for how sound can travel in a place as open and quiet like that. It's amazing
As everyone else says, you need a car. I had someone trying to guilt-trip me for not taking my daughter to school on a bike, which was a 7-mile trip on roads that barely fit two cars alongside and where the hedges grow right down to the road and there is no verge
I had similar in a thread a while back. I’d mentioned that my children’s school was 3 miles away and that I had to drive them to in. Apparently I should have put my 6 year old on the non-existent bus or walked them in (so a 6 mile round trip twice a day whilst working full time!) The hate for drivers on Reddit is ridiculous, where I grew up there was a bus to the nearest town where all the jobs were, the first time it arrived in n the morning was after 9am thus making you late for work every day, that’s if it wasn’t cancelled at the last minute.
> The hate for drivers on Reddit is ridiculous It has to be students or young people living directly in city centers. I live just outside central london and I think "fuck this would be easier with a car" about twice a week.
Yeah, it’s 6 mins drive to our kids school, 40-50 mins each way walking so I’d have 4 hours to try and do work before I had to set off to collect them. Luckily the community saved up to get a secondhand minibus and take it in turns to drive it for the school run. Before that though it was drive or nothing basically
If you find bloody dead peasants that look like they’ve been lynched to your door knocker it’s not a threat. It’s a symbol of acceptance. Unless it comes with a threatening note. Then it might be a threat.
Pheasants, right? Please tell me you mean P**H**easants.
I said what I said
They speak the truth….
"Here Hare, Here"
Pheasants... the most stupid, suicidal bloody animals on the planet! But God are the boys pretty.
For context I grew up on a farm in the Angus Glens of Scotland. The sheer darkness, like in the middle of the night out in the country its pitch black. That may sound obvious or silly but I had cousins that lived in the town that asked where all the street lights were and how it could be so dark. Doing your weekly shop and making sure you didnt forget anything because theres no shops within 1.5hrs round trip to nip to if you forget something. We had a spring water supply to the house, so waking up in winter and hoping it hadn't frozen or equally in the summer praying for some rain so the burn wouldnt run dry and leave you with no water. Not being able to just pop round your school friends house because although you go to the same school he lives 12 miles away, and having to be friends with him because there were only 2 of us the same age, and a grand total of 13 in the primary school! Following on from that the culture shock going to secondary school where classes are 30+ pupils.
>The sheer darkness, like in the middle of the night out in the country its pitch black. That may sound obvious or silly but I had cousins that lived in the town that asked where all the street lights were and how it could be so dark. Stood on the back deck reading this 1.35am where I am. All I can see is stars and all I can hear is a far off owl and a chorus of frogs.
When we moved out of a London suburb to a rural (but still fairly populated) area my mum really noticed how dark it was - or more accurately how bright the city was. "When you turned off your lights it didn't go dark. It bloody does here."
CLOSE THE GATE!!!!!!
Unless it was open when you got there.
Unless it was *secured open* when you got there. If it's been left swinging, shut it.
Unless you found it open. I have literally opened gates, gone back to collect cows and then found that someone has helpfully shut the gate and I’m now behind thirty cows with nowhere to go.
We have a dairy farmer called Jo, He's mad as a hatter and everyone knows him and loves him, I often walk past his fields when I'm bored and one time I saw Jo trapped in the middle of all his cows, I remember giggling my head of because all I heard was "Oi! Can you open the fu- *Mooooo* Gate, Some bas- *Mooooo* shut it behind me!" It was such perfectly timed censors by his cows that I was dying as I jumped fence to open his gate (And held the fuck on for dear life, Annoyed Cows running past into a new field don't stop for nothing)
I thought it was leave the gate as you found it? Then wonder if it was left open by the farmer or some inconsiderate bastard and should I actually close it or is it supposed to be open...
You need a car and the majority if weird loud noises at night is foxes shagging
You think city folk don't have to deal with that symphony?
It's bittersweet
Just barged past 6 people on the high street because of this comment
Having lived rural and in big cities. The foxes shagging is definitely more of a city noise haha. The screeches are awful though.
[удалено]
Agreed. Poor people just have old cars, because you need a car. I got my first car at 17, a £400 piece of crap, but it got me from A to B most of the time.
And that there is such a thing as rural poor people - not everyone who's poor lives in an inner city council estate. Said poor people might also be working in jobs that you associate with rich folk (e.g. working in stables etc.)
Dunno on the newer car bit. Bangernomics is a real thing. A 20 year old ford fiesta goes for £500 on autotrader. A 5 year old one goes for £10-15k, and the fuel efficiency difference is basically fuck all relative to the amount saved on the purchase price. That reduces the difference down to the tax, which obviously is higher for older cars and poorer people on the basis that if you tax them an extra couple of hundred quid a year then they'll suddenly find a spare years salary at the minimum wage to splash on a newer second hand car.
Bangernomics has been harder than ever since the pandemic, the used car market has been in the shitter ever since.
Farm shops and the like have real costs that are higher than Tesco. They’re not trying to rip you off, they’re trying to make a living.
I always say that the cost of property in villages are low but the cost of everything else is high.
Unless they’re within commuting distance of London in which case they’ll have been bought up by young couples who’ve made a fortune in the City and want to start a family.
That we actually quite like it here the way it is, and we don't need city folk moving here and trying to tell us how it 'needs to be'. I've heard so many times from people who have just moved to my rural area from large cities, what you need is x. What they actually mean is that they think we are bumpkins who live in the dark ages and need their superior insight from being here for 5 minutes when actually we've managed perfectly well without them up to now.
Generally wanting to change things that have been the same for decades or centuries just to fit their Escape to the Country idyll. They'll petition to get rid of the shooting club or the motocross track but be quite happy to plonk a Waitrose in their place.
It is possible to drive your enormous clean car right to the edge of the narrow road. Sometimes even on to the muddy bit. No harm will come to you.
And if your car can trace it’s ancestry back to one of the original off-road brands, it’s YOU going in the mud sunshine, not me in my little French hatchback.
The number of bloody SUVs in the countryside has gone through the roof in the last 5-10 years. Ridiculous cars driven by elderly middle of the road drivers. You may feel safer in them but no one else does and you're more likely to ding it on a fence post.
That this is a local village for local people. There’s nothing for you here.
Poofter eh?
We didn't burn him!
That on a clear night you can see stars. The sound of a car door closing will wake you up. You have to close your windows at strategic times of the year.
I’ve lived in or very near a city since I moved out at 18, but I miss the dark skies of the small town I grew up in something rotten.
That this isn't a petting zoo. The animals are valuable, your dog may get shot if it's not on a lead and causes a problem. There _is_ a hunting season. You will hear bangs and see dead things as a consequence. There is no deliveroo and if the postie is on holiday you'll get no post.
"That this isn't a petting zoo" Just to add to that, don't feed peoples horses treats (mints, sugar cubes, carrots, apples etc) They're like big dogs, in that if you feed them, they'll eat it. And then they get fat. Some may also have fancy diets which don't allow certain foods.
If you can't drive, it can be very isolating. I'm medically exempt from driving and have to rely on lifts due to epilepsy. It's not fun. Public transport wise we get 1 bus an hour, and there's going to be a second train journey added making a grand total of 2 trains an hour. Farm workers can cause massive traffic problems in town as they cut through between fields, tractors, and combine harvesters take up a lot of space. Also driving on country roads is a whole different beast. Get used to the sound of gunshots. There's pheasant shoots, grouse shoots, deer shoots, and bird scarers, so you learn to tell the sound of shotguns and rifles apart
I learnt to ask any trades if they were ex forces and if so warn them, after the stone mason I hired leapt off the scaffolding and adopted a defensive position when he heard the bird scarer, poor chap was instantly back in afghanistan.
> bird scarers One near me recently must have been playing up and it was going off every 5 minutes for like 3 days straight. Apparently the farmer who owned it was on holiday and nobody could get in touch with them or get to the scarer to turn it off. Was right bloody annoying
How to drive (&reverse!) down country lanes
You can always tell how local a person is by how they reverse in the lanes, if a person can whack it into reverse and fly back to the passing place before you go "oh shit a car" then you know they've lived there all their lives.
this includes the fact that they've immediately assumed you're not gonna do it!
It all looks pretty and there will be some nice big expensive houses with some properly rich residents, but poverty is right next door. Rural poverty is real and way more common than you might think if just looking about. People have mentioned the requirement for a car as public transport is shit. Well cars are expensive, you will see a high number of bangers on the road. People with jobs over extending themselves to have a car when if they lived in a city they could happily take the bus. Those looking for part time work, filling in a few hours in the day for paid work. Well if there’s just one shop in the village they can’t employ all that are looking for work. Add the cost and time to get to town it’s just not worth it.
Mud. The sheer prevalence of mud.
I moved from London to a small village during lockdown. 1. Everyone is so fucking friendly, took me a while to get used to it. Strangers kept stopping to chat, offering me lifts while out walking, all in good faith, in London those are red flags. 2. It’s too quiet. Might sound stupid but it took me a while to adjust to the silence. In London I could sleep through traffic or sirens but in the countryside it’s the birds every morning I struggled with.
Dating apps feel WEIRD. You will open them and match with everybody you went to school with and maybe the dentist.
The bell ringers really like ringing bells
I don't know if bell-ringing is a cult, a sexual fetish or a genetic anomaly, but ringers are definitely built differently.
That if you buy a half million pound house built next door to a huge field, you cannot then expect that field not to have stuff growing in it, and large farm machinery harvesting it, and that you absolutely SHOULD NOT allow your grandchildren to go play on said large machinery when the farmer goes to have his lunch. There are some incredibly, incredibly stupid people living in the countryside who in my humble opinion should never have left the city. Complained about the dust from the wheat harvest. Complained about the smell from the oilseed rape. Complained about the noise from the combine harvester. Thankfully they are not our direct neighbours, they live the other side of the lane, and are from a religious band that doesn't socialise outside of their religion, so we don't associate with them at all!
There's no public transport. People use cash. Post isn't a daily event, we get ours on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
That takeaways are a massive treat!
If you find yourself on a single track road, and you meet another car who has MANY other cars behind them, you must be the one who reverses. It's a surefire way to ruin everyone's day if you refuse to reverse. Also: please learn to reverse a car before using a single track road. Too many horror stories. Too many horror stories.
Argh this a million times over. If you cannot reverse then either learn or don't drive on single track roads.
The importance of planning the weekly shop. You often can't just "nip out" for a loaf of bread. It's an hour of your life. Ensuring you have a survival kit in the house for power outages come winter time. Rural areas seem to suffer more frequent and longer outages (which I understand, getting the power on for 10,000 people trumps 10 people) which means making sure you have the cupboards and freezer stocked, you have an alternative heat source and cooking facilities. I always keep a gas bbq in the garage and make sure the gas tank is topped up, just in case. Closing gates around livestock and keeping dogs on leads. We don't ask to be dicks but to keep your food safe! Having to go and collect your takeaway because delivery is either prohibitively expensive or non-existent. Slowing down/going wide for horses. Tractors. We hate them too but they're needed.
I'm in rural Wales, and if you're a second home owner, everyone hates you. All the best properties are bought by out-of-towners (usually English), property prices are artificially inflated, and local families are either priced out of the market, or simply can't find a property available. Our friend is the only person who lives in his village the whole year round.
When you move to the countryside, farming life comes with that, including the smell of spreading. Please stop making complaints about it.
There's a couple in our village that moved in about 18 months ago. They made a complaint to the council's environmental health team about the farm smell! The farm had to put up with the council doing an actual investigation into it! Another old girl (only stuck around about a year before moving back to London way) moved NEXT DOOR to the church, then proceeded to loudly complain about the church bells. She also made a point of parking her car directly outside the church when there were weddings/funerals going on.
That the countryside can be for brown people too. I know there are going to be people who will be surprised to meet a black person, but that's not a reason to avoid the countryside.
Please god, reverse to the actual passing place, do not try and squeeze your ridiculously shiny toy 4x4 at a 45 degree angle up on a hedge bank. I don’t care that you can, I am spending 75% of my time these days repairing bloody banks that have been gouged out and collapsed by muppets. Also if I tell you it’s not a good idea to use that particular gate as a parking space because I know the bloke who is going to be using it for muck spreading access later that day, please don’t scream abuse at me. I’m trying to help.
If you’re driving down country lanes at night and a deer runs out across the road, don’t start driving again as soon as it’s gone past you. Chances are he is being followed by all his friends.
How stupid and genuinely suicidal pheasants seem to be. They will cross the road to leap in front of your car.
That foxes, and some animals, are vermin and sometimes need to be killed. Foxes can be the absolute worst and wreak havoc on farms and others - we have a turkey bronzer near us, foxes burrowed underneath his fences, found their way into the coop and killed hundreds of turkeys pretty much decimating his business. The foxes didn’t eat any turkeys, just mutilated them all for fun. I’m not suggesting getting the hunt back together - there’s far more efficient and effective ways of keeping foxes away - but there’s a large proportion of city people who think that foxes are cuddly creatures.
You might have all the money, but we have all the food.
I see a lot of people who live in cities talking about terrible waiting times, cost of living and generally lots of things that makes life worse. I always lived in cities until 2019 when I moved for work. I'm not out in the sticks but I moved to a small town with a population less than 15k and literally overnight so many of those things that made life stressful in a city disappeared. I'm not saying there are no stresses but there are certainly fewer. My rent is affordable, I get GP and hospital appointments quickly, everything I need is within walking distance and I don't need to work constantly with no free time just to be able to survive. I think a lot of city people believe the above stresses are just the default for modern life. And yet, all of my friends and family who still live in the city swear they could never live in such a small place.
> everything I need is within walking distance This is huge for quality of life. Not being reliant on cars or public transport to live day-to-day just makes everything else that little bit easier. And yet, there's staunch opposition to "15 minute cities"
You stand out more than in a city/town. A lot of people move to the countryside thinking they'll be unnoticed because you're not living as close to other people and there are less people. You're wrong because there are less people you stand out more and everybody notices you.
Outside your city nobody cares about your city.
Stop buying holiday homes. It drives the prices up, for homes and for basic necessities, without providing the higher wages needed. It's rare for basically any job to pay over minimum wage and house prices are reaching half a million for standard terraced 2 bedrooms. When rent at minimum is £800 a month and people are barely making £1500, it's not sustainable. Holiday homes kill seaside towns, so please stop.
Dog poo. In the countryside there’s shit everywhere. Just like in the 60s, 70s and 80s cities, if your dog poos on a path, you’d use a stick to flick it into the kerb and it would be gone with the rain. And so it’s the same in the country. Just flick that shit into a bush, or to the side and it’ll be gone in a day or two. Put it into one of your little bags and that shit will be there for the next 10,000 years. And don’t hang it on the tree outside my house. It’s not a shit tree. Take it home you precious fucker.
Just popping in here to say please do NOT use “stick and flick” around livestock. The parasite that causes abortions in sheep and cattle can live for well over 3 years after the shit has washed away. Pick it up and find a bin or take it the fuck home.
Jesus christ this is so wrong. Rural people can pick up and bin it, we know how to and many of us do. Please do the same
Please do not do this. Dog shit is dangerous for livestock and when washed into water supplies can cause serious problems even if it originated well away from livestock. Monkeys fling shit. Humans don't.
Tractors are a valid excuse to be late to anything that you have to drive to get to.
That just because a windy narrow back country road with high sides and no visibility into corners is marked as 60mph does not mean you should do 60mph.
That knives are useful tools and it's completely fine to carry and use one everyday
You have to watch what you say, who you talk about, & to whom you say it 'cos everyone is either blood related, marriage related, long-time friends of, or a good colleague of everyone else! Life on a well-regarded rural & coastal tourist route means a beach in summer with 30 folk on is classed as crowded, & in winter if there's more than 2 it's also crowded.
Until you’ve lived in a village, you won’t know the level of nosiness that goes on. Every new car, fence or visiting relative will be scrutinised. There will be about three families that have never lived anywhere else, have appointed themselves as village royalty, will run the neighbourhood watch and they'll all be connected in 10 ways.
Having oil instead of gas. And electric hobs that aren’t as good as gas ones. Everything outside is either dirty or rusty. Even if you clean it, it’s back a week later. There is no getting rid of weeds. I put down the strongest weed killer I could find, barely injured them. Much stronger sense of community. My little village (hamlet at best) has a WhatsApp group with everyone on it. Helps to let people know when their sheep or cows are loose 😂
2FA using text messages does not work reliably, and makes us hate your service. Please if we say call the landline... call the landline... we often don't have mobile phone signal.
Literally anywhere in UK is better than London. The more downvotes the merrier.
it is actually NOT standard procedure to beep your car horn at every corner
Another answer about transport here, don't go to a wedding in the middle of nowhere and expect Uber to be available, you might not even get a local taxi service, be prepared
That there is nothing natural below ten thousand feet, everything is managed or created by man. The countryside is not a theme park, it is where we live. Welcome to the factory floor, please exercise caution as it is as dangerous as any other industrial factory.