The troubled village near Bristol where nothing is quite what it seems

The church clock has one hand, The Swan pub is in Duck Lane, the town hall was once the primary school and the village shop was once the village hall. Welcome to Tytherington, the village near Bristol where nothing is as it seems.

I don’t get that many visitors to Tytherington, although it is a beautiful classic West Country village that could have been created by Betjeman, Agatha Christie or Laurie Lee.

Its location just off the M5, with a huge quarry on one side, a massive solar farm on the other and a large quarry lake in another corner means people drive past Tytherington in the mistaken belief that there isn’t much to it.

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But it’s a vibrant community with everything it should be – albeit in a slightly distorted way. If you asked someone to describe a quintessential West Country village, they would probably describe something like Tytherington – with the streets to the village coming from all corners to meet in the middle, where the beautiful Norman church stands across the crossroads . the cotswold limestone pub. Around the corner is the town hall and the village shop and post office, and over another road is the village green.

Near this classical core are beautiful stone cottages, and as the settlement expands into the surrounding countryside, the houses move into the 20th and 21st centuries.

But while Tytherington is still quite small – well under 1,000 people call this place home – it punches well above its weight in terms of community, history, environment and generally things going on.

One of the most interesting things about Tytherington – and its nearby secondary hamlet of Itchington – is that the villagers seem to have proved very good at resisting the march of the Enclosing Act.

While other villages saw their vast communities and fields fenced off and given to a handful of wealthy farmers, Tytherington preserved or later created an impressive portfolio of communities, woodlands, hills and open spaces that are still fully open to the public and until at present. they don’t seem to be “owned” by anyone in the modern 21st century sense.

Therefore, they are now havens for wild flowers, plants, birds, bushes, trees, grasses, insects and animals that were once everywhere but are now almost nowhere. In Tytherington they spread from the common to the fringes.

There are so many large and small pockets of communities, woodlands and open spaces in and around Tytherington that they have had to get quite creative with what they call them.

There is Tytherington Hill, the large wooded hill that rises away from the center of the village to the north-east and offers wonderful views through the trees east to the Cotswold escarpment.

Then there is Baden Hill Common a little further along the same hill, Itchington Field, Hardwicke Field, which was donated by the Squire of that name in 1937 – neither of which are ‘fields’ in the modern sense – a common of half acre called Common Alm on the Itchington Road, and finally Stidcot Splatt, which covers a large area just to the east of the village and is a glorious example of the use of the West Country dialect word ‘splatt’ for a large piece of land. no one has come up with a better description for.

That is not to say that much of the land around Tytherington is not commonly farmed, with fields of cows or crops or hay meadows. But as well as the commons, steep woods and splats, a lot of the land around the village – and also around Itchington – has always been used for something other than farming.

Throughout history, Tytherington was well known as a place full of quarries. A thick layer of limestone is close to the surface here and has been mined for millennia. Most of the quarries have long since disappeared and are now havens for wildlife, but the huge one on the other side of the M5 is still dug for aggregate.

And Tytherington’s sunny location is also a magnet for solar farms, which cover an increasing amount of farmland in both the village and Itchington.

In the village proper, the community revolves around four pillars – the pub, the church, the town hall and the shop and post office. There is a huge DIY attitude in Tytherington.

When the primary school closed in 1983, it was empty, then turned into craft workshops. When the villagers wanted a bigger town hall, they got together, raised funds, created an ambitious project and took over the Victorian primary school and turned it into an impressive town hall and community centre.

When the village shop closed, and the people living in Tytherington realized that it meant they would have to do the one thing they preferred not to do, and go to Thornbury more than absolutely necessary, they put together a another volunteer project and created a purpose. -built the village store and Post Office where the town hall is located, on the other side of the car park from the primary school.

When the post office closed the post office in the 2000s, the people of Tytherington didn’t take that lying down either and, with the help of then local MP Steve Webb, persuaded anyone in authority to let them run. Post Office and give them the money to do it – so Tytherington has a village shop and post office which is run and managed entirely by volunteers.

There is never a dull moment at City Hall. It is regularly used by the nursery, a lunch club, a drama and music group, WI, am dram Churpel Society and several brownie and guide packs.

And maybe that whole ‘just do it’ attitude in the village comes from the fact that they measure time a little differently in Tytherington.

For centuries, daily life in the village was governed by a medieval clock that sat high on the church tower. When the vicar and the schoolmaster were cleaning out the belfry to restore and reattach the church bells after the Second World War, they found some old pieces of scrap metal. But something told them it was a little special, so they called in some experts and discovered they had rediscovered the old medieval church clock.

It was also restored, but a bit was missing – a minute hand. Further expert advice was sought and it was determined that the clock never had one in the first place – the people of Tytherington were relaxed enough not to worry about the exact time, but clever enough to work it out if they should have