Book description
When Byron Rogers moved to the village of Blakesley, quitting the
city for the country was for many people a way of escaping change:
nowadays we can see how they brought change with them. Over the years,
in his Village Voice' column in The Sunday Telegraph, he observed his
village's gradual evolution from a place where everyone knew everyone
else into a dormitory haven for car-borne commuters. Now, as his many
weekly readers requested, his idiosyncratic and personal chronicle of
an English village is collected in this book. Here, then, are the
stories of how the Methodist chapel became a car showroom, the
village's first-ever charabanc outing to the seaside back in the
twenties, the summer fête at which the author bought his neighbour's
shirts, his elevation to heady civic responsibility as Warden of the
Paths, and the decidedly strange tale of stubble-burning in the home.
But this tranquil Northamptonshire landscape is also located at the
absolutely geographical heart of England, and Byron Rogers uncovers
its astonishing and mysterious past, when it was truly at the centre
of things. Where traffic now crawls along the A5, finds Rogers, the
ground used to shake beneath the feet of the Roman troops marching
down Watling Street. For hundreds of years these placid fields were a
war front between Saxons and Danes, Royalists and Roundheads, in
yesterday's headlines. And, after only a century, a gaunt viaduct that
is the only monument to a great mainline railway seems as old as
pre-history. By turns touching and hilarious, The Green Lane to
Nowhere is a unique exploration of the great return to the
countryside, and the often weird surrealism of village life.
