In the summer of 1967, the essayist Ronald Blythe pedalled his bike around the Suffolk village of Charsfield, a quiet rural community 10 miles north of Ipswich. Blythe spoke to pretty much everyone he could find: the blacksmith and the farrier, the dairyman and the district nurse. They in turn told him how to best thatch a roof, how to shape a corn dolly, and why cowhide was the ideal material when making the harness for a horse. “The village keeps the same pattern,” explained Alan Mitton, the orchard foreman. “You get more or less the same groups of people keeping the same ideas. They don’t mean to get out of their ruts.”

I don’t know where we get the idea the country is unchanging. It’s atomised and isolated. But it’s violently changing Amanda Craig

Blythe’s interviews were later immortalised in Akenfield, an oral history that renamed the setting and many of its inhabitants, while ensuring their testimonies were preserved for the ages. At the time of publication in 1969, Akenfield was read as a poignant elegy to a feudal England, clinging on by its fingernails. These days the book could have blown in from another planet. The combine harvester has torn up the fields, the wheelwrights and saddlers have gone the way of the dodo, while the village economy is reliant on migrant labour and second homers. Twenty-first-century Akenfield has been knocked out of its rut – assuming, that is, it was ever stuck there at all.

“I don’t know where we get this idea that the countryside is unchanging,” says the novelist Amanda Craig. “It’s atomised and isolated. It’s overlooked and undervalued. But it’s violently changing beneath our noses.”

This sense of a rural landscape in flux – anxious and unquiet – is deftly caught in Craig’s latest novel, The Lie of the Land. Her setting is the fictional Devon village of Trelorn, “poorer than Romania … a sodden mound of greyish render and scaly slate”. Half of the townsfolk have resorted to using food banks. The others are angling for low-wage shift work at the Humbles pie factory. Alighting in Trelorn from cosmopolitan London, the principal characters can barely get their bearings. “When are we going back to England?” one asks plaintively.

The Lie of the Land is part of an extended family of contemporary village and small-town stories; a set of thematically linked cousins that spotlight the tensions at work within England’s hidden corners. These tales can be found on screen in Mackenzie Crook’s Detectorists, on stage in Matt Hartley’s Here I Belong (charting the winds of change that blow through a tiny community hall) and on the page in novels such as Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 and Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time. Once dismissed as a conservative backwater, the village is in danger of becoming vibrant and prolific.

We go to the city or the wilderness in search of adventure, to test our mettle against madding crowds or high winds on the moor. But we go to the village for different reasons – to reaffirm core principles or reconnect with some idea of home. This is a tug I’ve experienced myself. Having relocated from London to the West Country, I now spend a good deal of time in the sort of genteel, picturesque settings that would once have brought me out in hives. By the same token, my first novel, The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times, ends with the survivors escaping to a village. For a book that begins in a tangled forest and then gets trapped in a treacherous house, this destination held out at least the hope of a happy ending. If the characters could reach the village, the world might make sense and they’d finally be safe. And writing those chapters, I almost believed it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charlie and Daisy May Cooper in This Country. Photograph: Sophie Mutevelian/BBC

But of course it’s an illusion, a nostalgic construct; AE Housman’s “land of lost content”. Sooner or later, the dream runs up against the rocks of reality. Most villages, sad to say, are not self-sustaining chocolate box communities, where the baker’s boy pushes a laden bike up the cobbled lane. More likely they are isolated and dysfunctional, plagued by poor public transport and non-existent broadband. The centres a mess of defunct pubs and post offices. Social mobility has largely ground to a halt. The classic English village may be a lovely place if you have ready cash to sustain the fantasy. But for those who were raised there, it’s like living in limbo. They find themselves circling listlessly back over the same handful of haunts, or sitting on the same playground swings they first conquered as toddlers.

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In This Country, the Mucklowes come marauding through Northleach (population 1,800) like fiery Cotswold warlords

This Country is a BBC sitcom that makes molehills into mountains and spins base metal into gold. It’s about Kerry and Kurton Mucklowe, a pair of twentysomething cousins in a Gloucestershire village; jobless and restless and bored half out of their minds. The show takes their misadventures and frames them in mock-heroic terms, so that the Mucklowes come marauding through Northleach (population 1,800) like fiery Cotswold warlords descended from the ancient Saxon kings. The village is their stronghold, beset by danger on all sides. “I got enemies in South Cerney,” brags Kerry, the more pugnacious of the two. “I got enemies in North Cerney. I got enemies in Cerney Wick. I got enemies in Bourton-on-the-Water.” She makes these placid little hamlets sound like hostile rival tribes.

Creators – and stars – Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper (who in real life are siblings, not cousins) once dreamed of escaping the Cotswolds. The place was too small and their ambitions too big. So Charlie went to study sports science at the University of Exeter, while Daisy landed a place at Rada and appeared in the local paper. Both, though, wound up feeling hopelessly out of their depth. Which is how they ended up back where they came from, sharing a bedroom in the family home as if they’d never left. Daisy had studied acting alongside Alexandra Roach and James Norton. Now her former classmates were going great guns whereas she was back at square one.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustration by Andrea Ucini.

“I was looking at a job down at Argos,” she says. “Not that there’s anything wrong with Argos. I remember one day going down to the jobcentre. They said that the only work going was playing Father Christmas at a shopping centre in Cheltenham.”

This Country, they explain, was born out of frustration. Kerry and Kurton were conceived as thinly veiled alter egos and the stories were lifted wholesale from their own experience, brazenly namechecking old friends and former teachers and revisiting the time kids threw plums at their house. Framed as a fly-on-the-wall documentary, the show is the best kind of tragicomedy in that it’s at once pinched and inclusive; it crams the whole world in a bottle.

“When we were making the series, we figured probably nobody would watch it,” admits producer Simon Mayhew-Archer. “I remember telling people: ‘It’s raw and it’s lo-fi and in all likelihood it will disappear without a trace’.” Now, against the odds, Mayhew-Archer has a hit on his hands and a second series is in the can. In the meantime the Coopers have become resident Cotswold celebrities. They tell me that they were recently asked to open a bus shelter. They were unable to do it, but their dad drove past on the day. “There were about four people standing about on the street. And a whacking big ribbon tied around a one-seat bus stop.”

The motto in all of this: crawling home with your tail between your legs may actually turn out to be an astute career move. Daisy could even be representative of a wider trend – one of a new breed of artists who found themselves priced out of the capital only to make hay in the sticks. All being well, the money will follow. In June 2017, for instance, Arts Council England announced an increase of funding outside London by 4.6% (or an extra £42.5m each year), funnelling the fresh cash to small organisations at the expense of the large, city-based institutions.

Craig certainly feels that a corrective is called for. The UK arts scene remains too London-centric. On planning The Lie of the Land, she ran into opposition from her agent and publisher. “The urban is not interested in the rural,” she says. “Or rather they are only interested in it as an Arcadia or a lost Eden. The village is seen as the province of the Aga saga, or escapism – the bonnets and bustles of BBC period drama. But there are great stories, real stories out there in the country. It doesn’t have to be an endless rehash of Dickens and Hardy.”

The Lie of the Land does a fine job of debunking sepia-toned stereotypes. It casts the village not as some bastion of constancy and conservatism but as a lightning rod for change in the nation at large – electrified by Brexit, its future uncertain. Taken at face value, the book’s diagnosis makes you want to batten the hatches, or tether yourself to some standing stones in a field. And yet Craig explains that all this swirling topsoil is only one side of the story. Because the village has roots; the village has history. And the best village stories have one ear to the ground.

Andy digs out a trinket that turns out to be a Jim’ll Fix It badge. The Essex earth contains horrors as well as gold

Detectorists, the sitcom written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, is a tale of such quiet, contemplative wonder that each time I rewatch it I fall further under its spell. Sallying forth from small-town Danebury, it trails two middle-aged friends through the bridleways and meadows in search of buried treasure. Along the way, gentle Andy (Crook) and doleful Lance (Toby Jones) uncover buttons, bottle-tops and the rusted ring-pull from an old can of Lilt. One day Andy stoops to dig out a dirt-clogged trinket which, on closer inspection, turns out to be a Jim’ll Fix It badge. The Essex earth contains horrors as well as gold.

Detectorists has warmth, wisdom, a generosity of spirit. A more machine-tooled comedy would have installed Andy and Lance as the butt of the joke; bumbling eccentrics; idiots to be laughed at. Crook invites us to regard them as holy fools or as kindly mediums, in conversation with ghosts. And perhaps it’s not just Lance and Andy who provide a link with ancient history. The town of Danebury (actually filmed in Framlingham, Suffolk – just a stone’s throw from Charsfield) is depicted as your typical 21st-century English eyesore; a rash of new-builds, sterile pubs and knick‑knack shops. But it sits on foundations laid down by the Romans and is rumoured to contain a Saxon burial ground. The present is folded alongside the past.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Soil searching … Lance (Toby Jones) and Andy (Mackenzie Crook) in Detectorists. Photograph: Chris Harris/BBC/Channel X

Watching it, I kept flashing back to A Canterbury Tale, Powell and Pressburger’s peerless 1944 film about a traditional Kent village during the darkest days of war. Crook’s sitcom has the same strain of English mysticism in its DNA; the same fascination with themes of constancy and upheaval. It even boasts an almost identical scene in which a character, standing in a sun-drenched meadow, suddenly hears a drum of ghostly horses’ hooves at his back. So Detectorists doesn’t merely mine the ground beneath our feet. It also uncovers an antique village story that most people have forgotten.

Towards the end of Akenfield, Blythe interviews an unnamed local poet. The poet has fled to Suffolk from London. He lives in poverty but has made peace with that. He suggests that the village, like Narnia, runs to a different clock. One becomes aware of the rhythm of the seasons and the constant pull of the past. “Time in the village is quite different from time in the town,” he says. “You enter time when you enter a town – you rush through it. In a village time enters you slowly, naturally. I knew so little about time and its importance when I came here. Now its poetic value has been revealed to me.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sepia-toned stereotypes … harvesting in Ambleside in 1905. Photograph: Walmsley Brothers/Getty Images

Even today, almost half a century on, time is the cornerstone of the modern village tale. It’s there in Lucy Wood’s Weathering, a haunted house saga of sorts in which a family inheritance weighs like a damp burden. It’s there in Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time, a sharp evocation of a collapsed rural community, where the tractor drivers now work as Uber drivers and the “new estates [are] named after the places the developers had destroyed”. It can also be found in Tom Cox’s rambunctious, non-fiction 21st Century Yokel, in which the freewheeling author attempts (with varied success) to anchor himself in old traditions; swinging between the May Day festivals, fetes and scarecrow competitions in both Norfolk and Devon. Then there is one recent book that looms above all the rest.

Read the opening pages of Jon McGregor’s Costa prize-winning Reservoir 13 and you would be forgiven for expecting a police procedural, a homespun whodunnit, hunting the girl who goes missing on the edge of a Derbyshire village. Instead the author describes his tale as an “anti-thriller”. It shows how the initial trauma ripples through the community to the point where it becomes another part of shared history. McGregor chronicles the place year by year. Marriages stutter and businesses fail. Teenagers grow up and get laid and then make new lives elsewhere. Reservoir 13 runs to its own ceaseless rhythm. It marries the shallow human time of the village’s inhabitants to the unyielding deep time of the village itself.

McGregor lives in Nottingham. His previous novels have all had urban backdrops. But the city was all wrong for this kind of story. Village life, he points out, is defined by regulation and ritual, by the passing of the seasons. The scope dwarfs the characters but it reveals them as well. “The bigger idea was to show the passage of time, geological time,” he says. “And the image I kept coming back to was those old Scandinavian paintings that show a big mountain, a big lake and then a tiny white farmhouse in the bottom right-hand corner. In a city the buildings are everywhere. Machinery’s everywhere. Noise is everywhere. It’s harder to view people in isolation.”

Reservoir 13 exposes the very bones of the village, then studies the routines and habits that we deploy to sustain us

Reservoir 13 is a momentous achievement. It’s a book that exposes the very bones of the village, then studies the routines and habits that we deploy to sustain us. But its meaning is elusive, or at least deeply buried. Optimists might read it as a poetic affirmation of rural life and human endurance. Pessimists, by contrast, will regard it more darkly – as a portrait of an uncaring universe that people drift through and are gone. McGregor, for his part, is reluctant to choose. “Well, some people have said that it’s both of those things. That’s pleasing to me. In the end, that’s probably the conclusion I came to myself.”

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One frosty February evening I drive out to attend the preview of series two of This Country. It’s held at the Bingham Hall in Cirencester, a swanky place with alabaster pillars and wood-panelled walls, around the corner from a kebab shop. The season two is poignant and funny; it might turn out to be as good as the first. On stage, Charlie Cooper explains that the opening gag about a band of Peruvian buskers living rough in an attic was actually extrapolated from a local news story. Daisy in turn tells the tale of a girl at her school who fancied herself as the resident hard nut. She says the girl used to arrange fights inside Cirencester’s ruined Roman amphitheatre. Unfortunate souls who went in came away bloody-nosed.

If there’s a thread that connects all the best village stories, it might have something to do with Daisy’s anecdote, with its Poundshop pastiche of gladiatorial fury. Or to put it another way, the stories themselves are the thread; the elastic that connects the present with the past. This tension can be played for comedy, tragedy or drama – or some combination of all three. Who gets out and who comes in? What survives and what is swept away?

To mark next year’s 50th anniversary of Akenfield’s publication, the University of East Anglia has commissioned a brand new oral history. Akenfield Now is Lottery-funded to the tune of £76,000 and will be put together by local Suffolk schoolchildren. I like the thought of them retracing the route of Ronald Blythe’s bike, circling back over Charsfield to discover just how much it has changed. We may as well throw these children in among the other village explorers: Andy and Lance, Kerry and Kurton, McGregor and Craig. All are embarked on a common pursuit. They’re retreading old ground to uncover fresh stories •

• Series two of This Country begins on BBC One on 6 March. Both series are available now on BBC iPlayer.

• This article was amended on 6 March 2018. An earlier version misquoted a character from The Lie of the Land when it said London instead of England.

