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About 8 years ago I visited Dorset, meandering around looking at various neolithic antiquities.

I can't actually remember where I stayed but it was deep in the, obviously, very rural area near East and West Holme, Lulworth area. Lovely little place.

Anyway, it was a hot summer, and I spent a fair bit of time driving and walking through many of these beautiful little villages...absolutely picture postcard beautiful- rustic, pastoral little thatched cottages and rolling farmland. Hot lazy sun beating down...then it hit me - everywhere was silent...and there was nobody there. I genuinely don't recall seeing anyone as I walked through these tiny villages and hamlets...Blazing hot...no sound except birds and the occasional car. No lawn mowers, radios, tvs, kids laughing...just a still, hot, silence. Wouldn't say it was creepy...just felt very odd, eerie, strange. Felt alien.


I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason for this. I assume many of those properties were second homes for wealthy Londoners, or commuter houses, again, for wealthy London folks. So, all these little villages seemed empty...deserted...
 
About 8 years ago I visited Dorset, meandering around looking at various neolithic antiquities.

I can't actually remember where I stayed but it was deep in the, obviously, very rural area near East and West Holme, Lulworth area. Lovely little place.

Anyway, it was a hot summer, and I spent a fair bit of time driving and walking through many of these beautiful little villages...absolutely picture postcard beautiful- rustic, pastoral little thatched cottages and rolling farmland. Hot lazy sun beating down...then it hit me - everywhere was silent...and there was nobody there. I genuinely don't recall seeing anyone as I walked through these tiny villages and hamlets...Blazing hot...no sound except birds and the occasional car. No lawn mowers, radios, tvs, kids laughing...just a still, hot, silence. Wouldn't say it was creepy...just felt very odd, eerie, strange. Felt alien.


I'm sure there is a perfectly good reason for this. I assume many of those properties were second homes for wealthy Londoners, or commuter houses, again, for wealthy London folks. So, all these little villages seemed empty...deserted...
Sadly, this is quite common. I do a lot of hiking and many, many villages and hamlets are effectively dormitories. No shop, no pub, no life. It is quite refreshing to find a village with a little shop or a functioning pub.
 
Sadly, this is quite common. I do a lot of hiking and many, many villages and hamlets are effectively dormitories. No shop, no pub, no life. It is quite refreshing to find a village with a little shop or a functioning pub.

Yes, I very much agree.

It is very similar to North Norfolk, close to me. (Not Swifty's crappy pleb bit but the surrounding posh areas :p)

Beautiful, quaint, busy little fishing villages...couple of pubs, little fish shop, village community...rich outsiders come along and say this is nice, we want to live here. So they buy everything up...pubs close...shops close...community gone...and suddenly, they killed what they loved. Very sad.
 
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Sadly, this is quite common. I do a lot of hiking and many, many villages and hamlets are effectively dormitories. No shop, no pub, no life. It is quite refreshing to find a village with a little shop or a functioning pub.

When we nearly bought a house in the South Hams last year, it turned out that at least half the surrounding houses were actually second homes. It does annoy me that communities get wiped out by people who spend maybe a month there in a year whilst the locals have to go elsewhere because they can't afford the newly-inflated prices.
 
When we nearly bought a house in the South Hams last year, it turned out that at least half the surrounding houses were actually second homes. It does annoy me that communities get wiped out by people who spend maybe a month there in a year whilst the locals have to go elsewhere because they can't afford the newly-inflated prices.
I think half of the problem is thete are no community businesses nowadays, so when kids grow up they have no choice but to move away, then when the folks die the house gets sold to a second homer, because nobody can move there for work purposes because there is no industry, is a vicious circle.
 
Today we did a tour of small villages. With some creepy details, like:
What kind of weird garden ornament is this?
1618772379108.png
 
Today we did a tour of small villages. With some creepy details, like:
What kind of weird garden ornament is this?
View attachment 38263
This has made me want to photograph a certain front garden in a village near here. There are possibly well over 100 garden gnomes in various states of decay. Bugger it. Am gonna have to go do it.
 
When we nearly bought a house in the South Hams last year, it turned out that at least half the surrounding houses were actually second homes. It does annoy me that communities get wiped out by people who spend maybe a month there in a year whilst the locals have to go elsewhere because they can't afford the newly-inflated prices.
You should see the house prices in Ampleforth! All the pretty, tiny little cottages are bought up by rich parents of children at the school, so they have somewhere to stay when they come to take their offspring out at weekends.
 
Where do the school peons, er, staff live?
 
l quite like the place. On the other hand, it’s the only place in the UK where l’ve noticed that the council has felt it necessary to put stickers on the outside of the street recycling containers, reading:

“PLEASE DO NOT CLIMB INTO THE BINS”

maximus otter
ISTR a story in the news quite a while back (possibly 10-15 years or more) about someone who climbed into a bin in Brighton, fell asleep and got crushed. Hence the need for the signs, presumably.
 
I would have bet on a haunted house but ...
... this Frankenstein building in the middle of nowhere is a series of shops where you can buy furniture and accessories!
They have a website and they look quite neat: https://www.jaimysstyling.nl/

More views on Google:
https://www.google.nl/maps/@51.8585...4!1sbcCWAHgvOeukwU58vsNFcw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
https://www.google.nl/maps/@51.8587...4!1sFii_Xnktw6XjKxdKlbN5Eg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

And from the other side of the small river:
https://www.google.nl/maps/@51.8578...4!1sRKxIg-QuagJi1352iTC11A!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
 
Long before I suspected the existence of the town near the northern border, I believe that I was in some way already an inhabitant of that remote and desolate place. ... In any case, it was many years later that I first discovered the town near the northern border, and there I came to understand the source and significance of Dr Zirk’s mumblings on that nearly silent winter day. I noticed, as I arrived in the town, how close a resemblance it bore to the winterland of my childhood, even if the precise time of year was still slightly out of season. On that day, everything – the streets of the town and the few people traveling upon them, the store windows and the meager merchandise they displayed, the weightless pieces of debris barely animated by a half-dead wind – everything looked as if it had been drained entirely of all color, as if an enormous photographic flash had just gone off in the startled face of the town. And somehow beneath this pallid façade I intuited what I described to myself as the ‘all-pervasive aura of a place that has offered itself as a haven for an interminable series of delirious events.’

The above is: Thomas Ligotti, Theatro Grottesco, A soft voice whispers nothing.
I had never expected to find a place like this in The Netherlands. Now last Thursday we visited Roosendaal.

ro05.jpgro06.jpg ro07.jpg
ro01.jpg
Moonlight shone down through a window somewhere above me and spread dimly across a dirty concrete floor. I could see that I was standing at the bottom of an empty stairwell. I heard faint sounds of something dragging itself directly toward me. Then I saw what it was that emerged from a shadowy area of that empty stairwell. It was a head supported by a short length of neck on which it pulled itself along like a snail, moving by inches upon the concrete floor. Its features were indistinct yet nonetheless seemed deformed or mutilated, and it was making sounds whose meaning I could not comprehend, its angular jaw opening and closing mechanically. Before the head moved very close to me I noticed there was something else in another, even more shadowy corner of that bleak, moonlit stairwell.
Thomas Ligotti, Theatro Grottesco, Sideshow and other stories, The malignant matrix.
ro02.jpgro04.jpg
 
ISTR a story in the news quite a while back (possibly 10-15 years or more) about someone who climbed into a bin in Brighton, fell asleep and got crushed. Hence the need for the signs, presumably.

You might mean this poor bloke -
(BBC News)
Teacher's bin death in Brighton 'accidental'

The death of a man who was crushed after climbing in to a commercial wheelie bin was accidental, an inquest jury has decided.

Scott Williams, 35, of Dollis Hill, London had been drinking in Brighton in July 2009 when he disappeared.

His body was discovered at a Sussex waste transfer site two days later.

He'd been drinking and it was raining so he seems to have taken shelter in the bin.
 
When we nearly bought a house in the South Hams last year, it turned out that at least half the surrounding houses were actually second homes. It does annoy me that communities get wiped out by people who spend maybe a month there in a year whilst the locals have to go elsewhere because they can't afford the newly-inflated prices.

Was that anywhere near Dittisham on the River Dart estuary...? I used to catch the train at Exeter to travel to Totnes for a night out and if it had come down from London the First Class carriages of an HST would draw level with the platform exit. As I made my way out I would observe a small horde of First Class passengers pile out and call loudly for their waiting taxis bound for the villages of Dittisham and Cornworthy. Once, two of these chaps were actually dressed in flannels and carried a huge Victorian picnic hamper.

Now each to their own, but these were the second home owners (usually men from the City as the the wife would drive down during the day with the supplies) and they have devastated the village communities which are like ghost towns in the winter months.
 
Here's Guy Gibson and his dog, though I won't name the latter...
:rollingw:

I've always thought that name was an arch version of 'Blackie'. Y'know, like how people say 'extracting the Michael' instead of 'taking the piss'.
 
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