What the noughties did to one village

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A snapshot of one community shows how pub and post office closures have ravaged rural life

Sunday afternoon tea in the village hall at Wing, one of the smallest villages in Rutland, England’s smallest county. As I work my way through a plate of egg and cress sandwiches, I study the colourful Millennium Quilt hung like a banner on the wall. It has 16 hand-stitched panels, showing aspects of life here at the turn of the century: church, post office, pubs, tractors, things that could symbolise a “typical” English village.

“You’re looking at a bit of history there,” says one of the tea ladies. “Since we made that the post office has closed, the youth club has closed, one of the pubs has closed, the last farmer has retired and the ladies choir has packed up.”

All this in just nine years. Panel after panel metaphorically crossed off like numbers on a bingo card. It seems a microcosm of ever-faster change in the countryside. Back home, I ring the parish council and arrange a meeting.

Wing, with its 300 residents, is a neat hilltop village set in gently rolling farmland dotted with church spires. Its own church (panel 6 on the quilt) has a list of rectors dating back to 1217, but its major claim on the world’s attention is its circular turf maze (panel 7). Of unknown age and purpose, it lures tourists who sometimes feel a bit short-changed. At 40ft across, it’s not exactly Hampton Court.

The village has three buses a day: one from Oakham, the nearest railway station (four miles away), and two back. I take the hourly Rutland Flyer bus to Manton and walk the mile and a half to Wing on a winding road bordering allotments.

Many of the village’s most handsome homes are in the honey-coloured stone characteristic of Rutland. There are two or three thatched cottages, but this isn’t a chocolate-box place. It has as many unassuming semis as smart 17th-century houses. The post van passes, a man is tidying the churchyard, and here is the long, low village hall (panel 10), the former primary school.

Long-term residents Bryan Spooner, vice-chairman of the parish council, and Jeanette Hogarth, its clerk, are waiting. With them is Helen Bateman, one of only about a dozen of today’s residents born in the village, and Gloria Whight, a retired teacher who moved here when Wing still had its school. Its closure in 1978, they say, was a blow to the community, a taste of things to come.

“When the children started going to schools in other villages, it changed Wing,” Bateman says. “The people you grew up with and went to school with used to be your friends for life. Now children who go to one school don’t necessarily mix with children at another school.”

The four of them talk me through the Millennium Quilt, made mostly by the children. It is a catalogue of closures, with only two or three of its subjects still as they were in 2000. The first two panels, for instance, show Sheila and Tony Casey smiling behind the counter of the village shop and post office. It closed seven years ago.

“The shop used to be the hub,” Bateman says. “You went to buy something and you could be there an hour talking to people. It was an hour well spent. It was contact.”

Community life now revolves around the village hall’s Thursday coffee morning, which draws up to 30 villagers. The Cuckoo pub (panel 4) closed three years ago, but the King’s Arms (panel 5) is still open, with a highly praised menu that includes oysters, hare and smoked pigeon salad.

Skipping to panel 11, the youth club has wound up and its four dozen matchstick figures — Craig, Rachel, Natasha, Oscar and their friends — have now largely moved on to college and university, leaving an age vacuum in the village. There are about 20 children under 14, but, as elsewhere, computers seem to have greater allure than youth clubs.

And the Wing ladies choir, trilling away on panel 14, has put away its songsheets. “We all grew older and couldn’t sing as well as we did,” Bateman says simply.

At least the sturdy red telephone box (panel 8) is still here, though it now takes only cards, not cash. “We’re being blackmailed into the technological age,” Whight says. And Wing WI (panel 9) is still going strong, though more than half its members now come from nearby villages that have lost their own branches. “It’s hard to recruit younger women,” Hogarth says. “A lot only want to start going out at 9pm.”

With crucial symbolism, the last working farm has finished. The farmer, Richard Tulloch, also chairman of the parish council, has retired this year and no longer trundles around in his bright red tractor, sheepdogs in tow, as he does in panel 13. Land is still farmed here on contract, and Spooner and his wife, Brenda, still keep half a dozen of the 50 angora goats featured in panel 16, but Wing is no longer a predominantly agricultural place.

Many residents are now commuters, often the only people who can afford £400,000 for a two-bedroomed cottage. One villager sets off at between 5am and 6am for his regular drive to work in London, 100 miles away. Surprisingly, perhaps, only one house has become a second home, though there are three holiday cottages.

Like much of the countryside, the village has diversified into leisure. There is a camping and caravan site at Wing Hall, with fishing lakes, an excellent café and recently opened farm shop selling local produce, a sign of hope. On the main street is a stylish sculpture garden, covering eight acres and taking in meadow and woodland.

Despite the changes, the village remains confident about its future. “It’s a community where if you knock us down, we spring up again,” Bateman says. Spooner agrees: “There’s still a nice community spirit.” He takes me to see Ray and Gladys Birch, both 94 and the oldest residents, in the cottage where they have lived since 1947.

Ray, a former gardener, was, as he says, “the first baby born in Wing in the First World War”; Gladys moved here in 1932. “There are loads of people in the village now that I don’t know,” she says. “I see people going past the window with a couple of dogs and I wonder who they are.”

Ray recalls how most villagers used to work locally, either on the land or the railway, and searches through a drawer for a faded photograph from around 1930. Here he is, a young man in the fields dwarfed by a threshing machine and traction engine. It could be an illustration for a Thomas Hardy novel.

Back at the village hall, where the women’s indoor bowls session is in full swing, Whight has brought along more old photographs. Leafing through them are Sheila Casey, who ran the post office from 1974 to 2002, and Cynthia Harris, whose memory is jogged by one picture. It shows the eight-strong Wing Women’s Institute pipe band, posing in 1936 with recorders in hand and straw hats on head. “Oh look, there’s Miss Brocklebank,” Harris says. “Her cattle won quantities and quantities of rosettes.”

In the next room the Millennium Quilt awaits further changes. Panels 3, 12 and 15 are still to play for.