Alice Roberts TV - Laurie Lee & Cider With Rosie 2015 TV - Oliver Goldsmith - Annie Besant - Marshall McLuhan - W B Yeats - Victor Hugo - Charles H Spurgeon -
This is Must Farm in the fenlands of Cambridgeshire ... During the Bronze Age this settlement collapsed into the marshy fens. Alice Roberts, Britain’s Pompeii: A Village Lost in Time, BBC 2016
This site has been dubbed Britain’s Pompeii. ibid.
I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began. Laurie Lee, Cider with Rosie, 1959
Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad. Laurie Lee, cited Guardian 15th May 1997
I left behind the village life that was soon to break, dissolved and scatter. The valley would change for ever. And so would I. Cider with Rosie ***** 2015 starring Samantha Mortin & Archie Cox & Ruby Ashbourne Serkis & Emma Curtis & Jessica Hynes & June Whitfield & Annette Crosbie & Timothy Spall & Billy Howle & Georgie Smith et al, director Philippa Lowthorpe, BBC 2015
Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn,
Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn;
Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen,
And Desolation saddens all thy green:
One only master grasps the whole domain,
And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain.
No more thy glassy brook reflects the day,
But, choked with sedges, works its weedy way;
Along thy glades, a solitary guest,
The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest;
Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies,
And tires their echoes with unvaried cries:
Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,
And the long grass o’ertops the mouldering wall;
And, trembling, shrinking from the spoiler’s hand,
Far, far away thy children leave the land. Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village
The destruction of India’s village system was the greatest of England's blunders. Annie Besant
The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village. Marshall McLuhan
In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, ‘Here are lions’. Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, ‘Here are ghosts’. W B Yeats, The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore
There is in every village a torch – the teacher, and an extinguisher – the clergyman. Victor Hugo
A village is a hive of glass, where nothing unobserved can pass. Charles H Spurgeon