Take a drive through the Mendip hills in Somerset and you’ll come across some beautiful countryside sights: fresh mist rolling over green hills dotted with welly-clad dog walkers. Look more carefully, however, and you find people living a very different life.

Starting at the crack of dawn, Stephen Fowler, manager of the Dairy House hostel, is conducting a tour of the area’s “homeless haunts”. On the long drive taking in the market towns of Glastonbury, Shepton Mallet and Frome, he revisits the spots where outreach workers from his hostel have discovered people on previous tours.

“People assume there’s no poverty in an area like this but there is,” says Fowler, who points out that it’s often hidden. “If you’re going to rough sleep around here, it’s [usually] in the hedge rather than the shop doorway.”

Tucked away amid the watery rhines (drainage ditches) and woodlands, dozens of tents are counted during the tour – often adorned with poignant symbols of home. The area around one tent is decorated with bunting; another is pitched next to a bench with a sign saying “LOVE” on it.

A lot of these places would be hard to spot to the untrained eye – which may go some way to explaining why rural homelessness is often overlooked in comparison to those rough sleeping on the streets of the UK’s towns and cities. But research by the IPPR thinktank shows a 42% rise in rough sleeping in England’s 91 predominantly rural local authorities between 2010, when there were 397 rough sleepers, and 2016, when there were 565.

The Dairy House is the only direct access hostel in the area, meaning it will accept people who haven’t yet gone through the burdensome process of applying to the council for housing. Those accepted (up to a maximum of six at any time) live in a cottage set amid 1,000 acres of farmland, a tiny lake and a vegetable garden. Volunteers, staff and residents can often be found in the garden’s sun tunnel, laughing and eating fresh produce next to ripening pumpkins.

John Gray, 50, has always lived in the countryside. As a manual labourer he never learned to use a computer, which made it hard when he first applied for benefits. Gray became homeless after suffering a mental breakdown; when he was released from the hospital, he had nowhere to go.

“Without places like the Dairy House, there’s absolutely nowhere,” he says. “When I left [the hospital], they checked where I was going but didn’t follow up.”

An informal residence in woodland near Wells, Somerset. Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

This shouldn’t have been the case, according to Jai Vick, Mendip district council’s housing services manager: “We have emergency accommodation for adults, who can stay with a host family, but it depends on whether the person is appropriate. We also have an emergency duty team who can place people in bed and breakfast,” she says.

What about providing an emergency night shelter? “Geography is a massive issue,” Vick replies. “Where would you put it? We don’t have public transport in the same way here. Our closest train is seven miles out of town [Shepton Mallet]. We send our teams to people, to remove these sorts of barriers, but our specific rural context makes it harder.”

Gray talks about the process of isolation that drove him to sleeping in laybys in his caravan, then in the nearby adventure park when he began sleeping rough.

“I feel safer in less visible places,” he says. “I started off at the bandstand [in Wells]; I thought it looked safer, but there were a lot of people taking drugs there. I didn’t like it.” He explains that his mental health was a factor in wanting to be hidden away: “Sometimes, with such mental health issues, you don’t want to be around people. I even turned my own family away. They didn’t know I was mentally unwell.”

Some of the barriers to Gray accessing help relate to this rural setting. Public transport is expensive: when Gray first signed up to receive universal credit once he got settled in at the Dairy House, he says he spent £67 on buses to his allocated JobCentre in Bath, because they couldn’t process his claim at one closer by. Advisers in the Citizens Advice Bureau in Shepton Mallet report sending people to court in taxis for fear they will end up unfairly prosecuted, with no train early enough to take them.

The Department for Communities and Local Government does not recognise rural homelessness as a separate problem. A DCLG spokesman says: “Tackling homelessness is a complex issue with no single solution, but we’re determined to help the most vulnerable in society, whether they live in towns, cities or rural areas.”

Stephen Fowler, who runs the Dairy House hostel in Mendip, with outreach worker Rachel Inman. Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

However, in rural areas, homelessness feels very different. Paddy Johnston was discovered by Dairy House staff on one of their early-morning scouting tours. He describes how he gradually found himself living rough in ever-more isolated places, fearing groups of men coming out of pubs drunk and rowdy.

“You fear retribution for sleeping rough – people aren’t very nice,” he says. “If you go into the countryside, you’re sort of away from all that.”

But there are elements that make countryside rough sleeping dangerous, too. Johnston mentions run-ins with unhappy farm owners after, unbeknown to him, he had pitched up on their private farmland. Whether in the countryside or a city, he says: “Generally, you’re in hiding.”

Johnston grew up in care, and at 16 was placed with a foster family on “a massive country estate” in Worcestershire, where he was looked after by the maid. It wasn’t long before he decided to pack up and leave. “It was completely horrible. Any civility I had gained, I lost. I was left in the middle of nowhere. I literally didn’t know anyone there.”

He became a baker before developing an alcohol problem, which he says was a way of coping with his abusive past. Since then, years of homelessness and unemployment have made it harder to get his life back on track. “In the earlier days it was easier because you could get a job. That’s not so easy nowadays.”

With the help of the Dairy House, however, Johnston’s life has turned around: six weeks ago, he left the hostel to live in a nearby communal log cabin which, he says, “suits me down to the ground”. The scheme was set up to support people who have been rough sleepers, but aren’t quite ready to live in traditional bricks and mortar housing.

Yet the general picture in Mendip appears bleak: workers at the local Citizens Advice Bureau report growing destitution in the region, including among people with jobs. “In the last six or so years, the level of destitution has massively gone up here,” says Sam Hook, one of the CAB advisers. “Never before did we see so many people who were starving. I’ve never given out so many food vouchers before.”

‘I used to have three homes’

Nicholas Shipton, 53, once owned three houses and had his own landscape gardening business, renting out one of his properties through the council to survivors of domestic violence. But when his wife left him, he says he went off the rails. He found an abandoned factory, sleeping on some car seats inside: “It had a roof but it was horrible. I used to hide there every day, then go out and steal things to eat.”

Shipton points out that in the countryside there is less begging and visible homelessness, which might explain why people think it’s less of a problem. National initiatives such as No Second Night Out, which involves outreach teams finding rough sleepers based on referrals and scanning the streets, don’t cater to unearthing this type of homelessness.

Abandoned camping equipment in a field near Glastonbury, Somerset. Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian

At Mendip council, Vick says: “We have tried our best to adhere to it, but it’s really different [in a rural setting]. We’re not a unitary authority, we are two tier. That means people can’t get to us, we have to go to them, which takes staff time. You spend longer building relationships with people. If you don’t have a car and you live in the woods, you are not going to walk to services; we will need to send someone. All these things require additional funding.”

Shipton puts it quite simply: “It’s all very well making these policies, but they don’t suit everybody. We need to take everybody as an individual, and treat them as such.”

He adds: “People see the countryside as picturesque: a holiday destination free from problems such as poverty and homelessness. But nearly everything’s owned by someone else who doesn’t live here.” He isn’t angry at individuals, though: “I used to have three homes. Why shouldn’t they, if they’ve worked hard?”

A local estate agent, Ian Oldham, says he has seen a marked increase in the number of people purchasing properties solely to let them out through Airbnb. According to the 2011 census, 6% of houses in the Mendip area are second homes, and a large proportion of other homes are left empty.

The transitory nature of this area, with young people leaving and older people moving to the countryside to retire after they have made their money, can mask the deeper inequality and poverty beneath.

Conservative councillor Harvey Siggs, leader of Mendip district council, says a number of young people – including his own children – have had to leave to get well-paid jobs in the city, as Mendip is a low-wage economy.

Siggs calls it a choice to stay in the countryside – to stick to a relaxed lifestyle over the busy bustle of the city. Others say they have no choice but to stay here. A recent report by the Social Mobility Commission identified nearby West Somerset as the most unequal region in England in terms of social mobility.

Wells was one of the “trial areas” where universal credit was first rolled out about 18 months ago. Anecdotally, this seems to be causing problems: the local estate agent talks about rising numbers of landlords refusing to take universal credit claimants, while Citizens Advice says the majority of the calls it receives are from people on universal credit. But Siggs says he hasn’t heard about any problems with the programme.

In Mendip at least, the burden of dealing with rural homelessness depends on a number of well-meaning individuals. The Dairy House hostel is run in collaboration with the Elim Connect Centre Church (where Fowler is an ordained minister), the district council, and the tenant farmers, Suzanne and Rob Addicott. Fowler says the hostel would never have been started up without community fundraising, and the dedication of a small number of people in the area wanting to address Mendip’s growing homelessness.

Their effort is much appreciated by the people living at the hostel, but resident Nicholas Shipton believes the service should be provided by the state. “We should judge ourselves on how we look after our weak members,” he says. “If we’re not doing that, we’re not doing a good job on anything.”