Neighbourhood – A Year’s Life in and About an English Village by Tickner Edwardes (1865 - 1944)

If you love the quiet of the country - the real quiet which is not silence at all, but the blending of a myriad scarce-perceptible sounds you will get it in Windlecombe, year in and year out. For how many ages a human settlement has existed in this wooded, sun-flooded cleft of the Downs, it is impossible to hazard a guess. Windlecombe is mentioned in Domesday, but the stones of the old church proclaim it as belonging to times more distant still. Neighbourhood, the daily interchange of thought and word and kindly deed, is a necessity for all healthy human life, and the natural medium of all true advancement. And nowhere will you find it of such sturdy growth, rooted in such nourishing, yet temperate soil, than in the villages of modern England. (From the Introduction of Neighbourhood – Tickner Edwardes) Although the village of Windlecombe is itself fictitious, it is based on the tiny West Sussex village of Burpham – a place that Tickner Edwardes lived in for a time before WW