ABSTRACT
One great loss in current rural communities is the knowledge of community stories. This shared understanding can be as slight as knowing why an oak tree has
a large gash on its trunk (a milk lorry crashed into it in 1953 and Farmer Dickson pulled it out of the ditch with his tractor – a David Brown) or extend to intimate knowledge of families, scandals, achievements and shame.1 Residents without access to these, often apparently inconsequential stories therefore lack a ‘sense of place’, a quality which is best achieved through absorbing the layered meanings accreted through centuries of, often oral, storytelling and shared experience.
