The love of the countryside by the non rural public

AdorableAlice

AdorableAlice

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Example one.

Group of ramblers all over 75, fair play hope I can walk for miles at that age, came across us yesterday. We are wet, swamp mud and as for gateways well, a snorkel is needed.

On hearing the screams I go out into the field and find several ladies floundering. I rescue them and get them onto concrete. Why is it so muddy dear ?, well it is winter and a wet one at that. But dear, when we came across last time it was lovely and not muddy at all. When did you last come across ?, June dear. That was followed by, why are the other fields so green. My answer of land management for the Spring did not seem to register.

I kept my cool and led them across the yard and out onto the lane, explaining that the next bit of path was very muddy. I didn't mention the five hungry, bored horses that were hanging around. They then asked me what I was going to do about the flooded path, my comment of asking him upstairs to turn the tap off seemed to go down well and off they went.

Example two.

My hay man came in this afternoon and I mention the above incident to him. Laughing he said he could better it.

He was hay making last summer on a boiling hot Sunday afternoon. Field has footpath across it and a large group of ramblers appear. Being a kind and polite man he stopped and let the group go past without covering them in dust.

A gentleman walker approached the tractor and asked the farmer if he knew what day it was. Yes it is Sunday. The walker then said the farmer should not be working on a Sunday, and the gentleman's walk had been ruined by the noise, he stated he had a right to peace and quiet whilst enjoying his walk.

The farmer explained that farming is not governed by what day it is. The seasons and the weather dictate what happens in the countryside. The walker was having none of it and said he would be reporting the farmer for ruining the peace of the countryside on a Sunday.

The next bit I cannot repeat, but think baler, bottom and no sunshine.
 
Haha, that last one made me laugh!!
I was riding around my fields one day when I came across a woman, map in hand, who was clearly not on the footpath, so I tried to be helpful and point her in the right direction. She then proceeded to tell me that all the hedges were in the wrong place and how could she follow the map if we kept moving them. Hedges are all hundreds of years old, with mature trees growing out of them.
I told the silly cow to learn to read her map before venturing into the countryside!!
 
AMAZING! Having holiday lets on the farm I sadly have to deal with constant rural ignorance.
The weather is often us local folks fault. As is the mud, lack of phone signal, rolling power cuts and sight of farm animals is often a huge shock(so is my electric fencing apparently...:P) but these are corkers! looking forward to more stories of silly muggles.
 
We are lucky enough to have 700 acres of common land to ride on, straight off the yard. It has a historic 'stone circle' which attracts all sorts!

During the week it is lovely and quiet to ride, but come a sunny weekend or a bank holiday, all the townies come out - cue women in flip flops trying to push prams through the mud, uncontrolled dogs and flapping neon coloured kagoules...

The funniest thing I have ever seen was a load of naked geriatrics dancing around the stone circle at summer solstice - I have never trotted past so quickly!!!!
 
Admitting that I like the smell of cow poo to non country kids is a bit embarrassing :p

I organised the walk for my department's Christmas lunch. It was a brief (3 mile) bimble in the Peak. Some people turned up wearing lovely leather fashion boots or converse. On the muddy section (I walked straight through) it took ages to get everyone through and people were trying to drop stones for them to stand on. I was torn between laughing and crying. My supervisor, who is reasonably outdoorsy, said surely it's illegal to have a footpath in this condition (ie a few inches of mud in winter). Err...
 
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I got some photos printed off and the sales assistant asked me if they were of Brighton. No, I said, they were Aberystwyth. Turned out the sales assistant had never left London in his whole life, but he knew all about Aber 'cus his vicar is Welsh. Its easy not to realise how lucky we are having a connection to the countryside.
 
The village church that stands on the edge of the Cotswolds, dating in part back to the Norman Conquest, now stands silent because of the townie magistrate who has moved in next door. He didn't like the church bells sounding at 11am to welcome the sunday congregation. Hopefully, the parish council will throw out his complaint soon, and if I was the farmer owning the fields behind his house, I would be putting some pigs there for the next few months!!
 
EffyCorsten said:
HA yep I've shocked a few with this one also my love of stepping on them when they've crusted over a bit on a lovely summers afternoon. ahh memories
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I remember having water fights bare foot in the cow field behind our house and stepping on sloppy cow pats, better standing on them than thistles IMHO! Luckily farmer is a friend lol
 
It amazes me how many people move out to the country then complain about church bells, cows mooing, cockerels
crowing etc! I moved out from south London to the country and am always pleased to see tractors on the roads!
 
As a city girl who eventually made it to the country, i feel very blessed When I see a gaggle of walkers out for a day in the country, i just thank my lucky stars I am here every day rather than chained to a desk in the city with views of pavements and red brick. Aren't we lucky? Even with the rain and the mud I wouldn't trade my life for one in the city. My nails are a complete mess though!
 
Aaaaah the weekend townies! Living in what is essentially a suburb with access to lots of rural walks (Sandhurst/Yateley/Eversley), we get them all the time. They wear white trousers and unsuitable shoes, they are often pushing a buggy over unsuitable terrain, they usually have small/yappy/ill-mannered dogs and they themselves have little knowledge how to control those dogs. They hate mud and muddy dogs, get irritated when muddy dogs run past them/brush up against them, can't control their own yappy/unsocialised dogs and don't have a clue how to control their dogs when other dogs are around. Sigh. Also, God forbid they should meet any horses . . . they would probably either hide in the hedges or let their dogs mill about all over the path. Hate them.

P
 
Oh dear, those stories are very funny and, unfortunately, very believable.

I live in London but don't count myself as a 'townie', I'm a country girl at heart who just hasn't got round to moving out of the concrete jungle yet!!! We're not all eejits, I promise :tongue3:
 
My cousin went to speak to a walker who had let his dog off the lead in our field and it was chasing sheep.She went in diplomatically as we know who he is and he has only moved to the area recentlyl.He was amazingly arrogant and suggested the dog hadn't done any harm,and she should let it go as it was Christmas.Cousin asked if he'd lived in the countryside before,chap got very arsey and said that he had,then added that she couldn't prove anything as there was no blood on his dog.Cousin pointed out that the sheep were in lamb and being chased could cause them to abort,but he wasn't having any of it.

She did ask if she could have his address,but he refused.Stupid really,he has a very strong accent and has a very distinctive looking dog,so we worked out where he lives,plus it turns out that his kids are in the same class as ours.We have made sure that every farmer and land owner in the area knows about him and his dog.
 
OH and I moved to a village a few years ago and most of the people on our cul-de-sac were ex townies. The woman next door used to wash her car every evening because of the mud. You could hear her chuntering away to herself about farmers and mud, and she was going to complain, blah, blah, blah.

Another neighbour complained about the church bells chiming every quarter hour 24 hours a day. Luckily the parish council laughed him out of the meeting when he complained :D

Another complained about the local gamekeepers dogs barking, cockerels crowing, and even the swans and geese on the lake!

We moved, loved the dogs barking, church bells, various bird noises and mud, but couldn't stand the moaning, whinging townies :D

Oh, I forgot about pigs! There was a pig farm a few miles away, and if the wind was in the wrong direction the whole village smelt of pig. Oh, the complaints about that one!
 
Also forgot about walkers. We used to run a guest house in Snowdonia. The amount of guests who were unsuitably dressed to walk in the mountains. One particular group were happy to set off in flip flops, shorts and vest tops, despite being warned that it would be cold in the mountains and their footwear was inappropriate. You evidently can't educate stupid!
 
My wonderful maid of honour organised a clay pigeon shooting day for my hen do (I had no idea about it - I had just said if she dared take me to a spa I would find a new maid of honour!!) and two of my friends turned up in high heeled trainers...the shooting range was halfway up a fairly steep hill on the banks of a loch in the Trossachs and the day was run by two wonderful farmers. Between high heeled trainers and squeals about midgies and how scary the guns were, I'm not surprised I won the mini competition that they kindly ran for the 10 of us!! One of my friends (wearing one pair of high heeled trainers) when asked what sport she does (the elder of the two farmers was trying to find her inner competitive streak!) she replied "yoga"...the look on the farmers face was priceless!!
 
I once saw a woman dressed in a red velour jacket and a pair of high heels attempting to descend Snowdon via the Pyg Track. She was halfway down the zig-zags and spending most of her time on her bum!! I can only think that she missed her train back down and that she wasn't actually intending to descend on foot, although the chap with her did have more appropriate footwear on.

On the subject of the Scottish midge, I went to Glen Nevis with a boyfriend who was a definite townie, we were just starting to put the tent up when he started to moan about being bitten and asked what all this little black flies were. I replied 'oh, did I forget to tell you about the midges?', to which his reply was to shut himself in the car and watch me put the tent up!!

I took him to see the horses once, and he spent the next two hours washing his hands!!
 
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I blame the Country Living, National Trust view of the countryside that sits on people coffee tables, with a green fields on every page, and animals clean, grazing on immaculate grass. I notice they never do photo shoots in winter.
 
MrsElle said:
Also forgot about walkers. We used to run a guest house in Snowdonia. The amount of guests who were unsuitably dressed to walk in the mountains. One particular group were happy to set off in flip flops, shorts and vest tops, despite being warned that it would be cold in the mountains and their footwear was inappropriate. You evidently can't educate stupid!
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Sadly you can't beat it out of them either... =D We have plenty of those here on Exmoor but Snowdonia that just takes the biscuit!
 
Oh, these are sweet. Completely agree with oldie48 that we are plain lucky.

Even so, I remember with fondness when I lived in the east end (london) and was doing my PhD. We used to take the undergrads out to the country for field trips - lots of them had never been out of London. We spent a long day on the beach once, and one of the brighter ones asked why the water was going up and down... (that'll be the tides, then). And then walked through a field, to hear one say 'Look at those funny looking things! It's like they're covered in wool'. They were sheep.

Really liked the glamorous girl who wore full leather and high platforms to walk up a hill (not an especially challenging hill, either). She needed to be carried, but was hugely charming and funny about it, so it made you not mind quite so much...
 
Some friends recently moved from the town to a nearby village. I got a message from the wife asking for advice to pass on to her husband about how to deal with cows. When questioned, he was taking the dog for a walk and the young cattle were galloping over to see them, the footpath runs through their field with no alternative route other than to turn back. When I said he should probably avoid that field until the cows moved, and if he did come across any be ready to drop the dog's lead etc, all the basic cos safety stuff including that people are killed almost every year by cattle when out walking, she replied with astonishment that she probably ought to stop taking the mickey out of him for being scared of a few cows! Poor guy.
 
I hate people who move from a town to country that moan about the cockerels, the cows being moved from field to field down the road, the smell of the cows and the mud. Makes me seeing these people walking dogs in knee high, high heels and moaning shoes getting ruined in the mud. THATS WHAT WELLIE BOOTS ARE FOR. Rant over
 
In fairness, I moan when I have to go into town - about the horrible tube, the rude bargy people, how busy it all is, getting home on a nasty late-night drunk-o'clock train where there's always some man singing, or being sick...
 
That's why I don't ever go to a city!!!
Funnily enough, although I live in a small town surrounded by countryside and right on the edge of the Cotswolds, there are a surprising number of people who have no idea of the countryside, even though it's right on their doorstep. I call it chav culture to be honest. The town is a sort of amalgamation of two places, one a small town dating back to the 12th century, the other a new town dating back to the 1960's. The difference can be seen when wearing wellies in the Tesco in the new town and wellies in the Waitrose in the old town. I feel more at home in Waitrose!!!
Some of the chavs do venture out into the surrounding countryside, even for an early morning Boxing Day walk...from the boot of their car to the verge, to dump all their xmas rubbish. Argggg
 
I'm in a coastal town but 20mins from the South Downs so get both the sea idiots and the countryside idiots. Also spend 3 days a week in central London which I cope with, only moan about the tourists who stand on the left but I could never live there. My commute's too pretty for a start!

Latest one was a letter in the local paper demanding to know why the footpath than runs parallel to the old canal was muddy with no handrails?!

Also was sat admiring the view over the summer by a field of cows and overheard 'why are there cows in this field, it's ruining my walk'.
 
I breed chickens for showing and have over twenty cockerels. I hold my breath for quite a while after someone new moves to the village!
 
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