Byron Rogers for years wrote the ‘Village Voice’ column in the Daily Telegraph, and this collection of articles on his life over the past 22 years in an English village is published because of the continued weekly requests of his readers.
Blakesley is not a picture-book village. Rogers found ‘a lost triangle of land where Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Northamptonshire meet, which the main roads circle and where no tourists come’; not at all unlike Ronald Blythe’s ‘Akenfield’ in Suffolk in the early Sixties.
By leaving the city for the country in the Eighties, Rogers was ahead of his time. It was rare then to settle in the dead centre of England in a place of no ‘outstanding natural beauty’, far from anywhere and knowing absolutely nobody. He was married. His daughter, now a university student yearning to live in a town, was born there, but the family has clearly been happy, and Rogers is part of the village, a visitor of the sick, lonely and dotty, a listener to stories, a worker for causes, well-known to church and pub and has been appointed to the ancient title of Guardian of Paths.
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