Opinion: Pubs are the beating hearts of villages
© Adobe Stock I was showing a fellow farmer around the place the other day when he spotted a funny round patch in the crops at the top of a field. “What happened there?” he asked.
I pondered some imaginative but dishonest answers, perhaps involving aliens, crop circles or ancient burial grounds, but finally had to admit to a fairly banal explanation.
“That’s where we held the village bonfire last November.”
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Back at the grain store, my guest enquired about the chalked graffiti all over the walls, and I explained that we’d just had a big party and the primitive artwork was the result of the locals being ill-advisedly invited to contribute to the general decor.
Outside, I found him scratching his head and pointing at a rickety steel structure with a platform some 8ft in the air. I mentioned that it was the starter’s tower for the annual soapbox race we hold here.
My visitor then leapt to the completely erroneous conclusion that I was some sort of dedicated pillar of the local community, which is patently untrue.
All these things took place as the result of attending our village pub for a couple of hours most Friday evenings as a sort of pressure release from the farm.
And – as we all know – the best ideas always come from late-night discussions down the pub.
“I’d love to do things like that on my farm,” he said, “but the problem is, as we haven’t got a village pub.”
As a trustee of FWAG South West, I regularly attend board meetings in village halls, hired for the day.
The ones I’ve seen are without exception spotless, well appointed and often smell of new paint. Many have signs proclaiming their funding from the National Lottery et al.
But unless you’re in the bingo club, doing weekly yoga or are directed there as a handy venue for a meeting then it’s difficult to see how they contribute more to the wellbeing of a community than a welcoming village pub.
Which are currently closing at the rate of six a week.
Would it be impertinent to suggest that some of the charity funds lavished on village halls and playgrounds get shared to support the village inn as well?
The pub provides a useful sounding-board – though I’m still miffed that my suggestions of a bar crawl in tractors and trailers (obviously with designated drivers), abseiling from a selection of local buildings and coasteering under some notoriously crumbling cliffs were dismissed by certain timorous souls.
Occasionally, they can be good for you too, such as the time I entered the village 10k run for a pub bet.
I do these things for purely selfish reasons – farming can get repetitive and they’re a bit of a laugh.
With a good network of volunteers you don’t need to commit unmanageable amounts of your time either. And you can usually recruit people to help move cows while you’re there.
I’m not sure our village has a sense of community more special than anywhere else, it just seems catalysed by meeting up in the pub.
I only blew in here from the other side of Dartmoor eight years ago, but the difference is chalk and cheese. The old farm didn’t have a village pub, you see…