Change does not have to mean decline for our resilient villages

I would like to thank the man at Ilmington in Warwickshire who was walking his dog as I turned back from the church. It was dusk, the church was locked but he told me to help myself to the plums on the fruit trees growing over the churchyard wall – I ate a score at least.

I'm equally grateful to the boatman who took me over to Inverie on the Knoydart Peninsula, accessible only by sea or a 20-mile tramp over the hills (no motor vehicles can get there). It was a bit of a diversion for the party celebrating somebody's 50th birthday who had hired the boat to take them to a restaurant along the coast (I hope they got there, and thanks for the beer).

We all, surely, love villages. The green, the parish church, the village pub – these things are icons of our national identity, particularly for

the English. For many people, they evoke a world of security and tradition, of thatched roofs and woodsmoke, which is kinder and calmer than the menace of the modern city. Asked where they would most like to live, the majority of folk will say a village.

They cherish this ideal as they commute from non-descript suburbs or battle through urban streets. Londoners cling to the belief that their busy neighbourhoods have not lost the intimacy of the villages out of which they grew.

In the overcrowded South-East, the village character of settlements is defended, even when they grow to contain several thousand people. Once, though, you get north of Leeds, villages seem to come into their own.

You would hardly have thought it was possible to build anything so beautiful, a seemingly natural complement to the wonderful landscapes amid which they are set. Coxwold, Old Byland, Sledmere, Blanchland – certainly we seem to have lost the knack of creating settlements of this loveliness today.

But sometimes pretty villages have to pay a penalty for their looks. Because they are so desirable, the price of property has rocketed. It is difficult for local young people to find anywhere to live, and so they drift off to the outskirts of the local town. Pubs and schools close.

Communities that might once have supported a dozen shops now find that they have none. Without a shop, village people have nowhere to meet each other and exchange news. Instead, they drive off to the supermarket without meeting anyone.

In the mornings, the village empties as the commuters leave for work, conscious perhaps of having made a pact with the devil – for the cars on which they depend have become increasingly expensive to run. If the nearest hospital is an hour's drive away, a village isn't always a good place to fall ill.

Often, the church becomes the last functioning resource, although even here the vicar is forced to dash between half a dozen parishes, whose rectories have all been sold. And oh dear, I don't even like to think about George Osborne's cuts.

From all of which it might seem that villages are in terminal decline. I don't believe that for a moment. Actually, they're in better shape than ever. They are not the same as they were 60 years ago. Then, 90 per cent of people living in the average village were earning their money from the land; now that figure has been reversed.

Retirement and tourism are now the big employers, not farming. After the war, when the bicycle was the most common means of transport in the countryside, life was local, but lacked variety and choice. Work on the land was often back-breaking, and perhaps mind-numbing, too. Scattering seed broadcast – a practice that still continued into the 1940s – was Biblical, but not efficient.

Thus, as the Year's revolving Course goes round,

No respite from our Labour can be found:

So wrote the 18th-century poet Stephen Duck about the backbreaking monotony of farming, for those who had to perform tasks such as threshing by hand. And he knew; he had been a labourer himself.

The physical condition of what we would now regard as charming villages was generally woeful.

Water streamed down the insides of many walls. Disease was rife, overcrowding miserable. Not surprisingly, the ablest children of the village often left to make a better life elsewhere.

Physically, villages have never been in better heart than they are now. They are hugely more prosperous than they would have been before the Second World War. Prosperity has brought its own problems; to a

purist, cottages do not always look better for being done up. But the evils of affluence are nothing to the starvation that so often stalked

the lives of country people, even when they were employed in

growing food.

Has community spirit died? I don't think so. If you want to see a good panto this season, go to the village hall. As many flower shows, ftes and scarecrow festivals seem to take place during the summer as there are villages. David Cameron may

talk about the Big Society as a new idea, but villages have already discovered it.

Country people are self-reliant, used to helping each other out. Post offices may, alas, be closing, but broadband offers new possibilities – for example, speaking to the doctor via Skype.

In time, it will offer more opportunities, particularly for bright, entrepreneurial folk. Increasingly, those people will be able to live and work from anywhere. Many of them will choose villages. I predict a village renaissance.

To order a copy of Villages of Britain. The Five Hundred Villages That Made The Countryside, Bloomsbury, 30, from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbook shop.co.uk. P&P is 2.75.