Rooted in Devon

I leave our house and walk up the hill, away from the village we live in. I stop at a gap in the thick hedgerow and lean on a gate, which is held by the soil, which in turn is held by the bedrock of this place. I am trying to feel this too, to believe it – that I am held by this place. Here in Devon – a county name which, in the old language of the Celtic Dumnnonii tribe who once lived here, means “deep valley dweller” – valleys drip with life and stories, dense hedgerows dominate, and mossy dampness reigns. I come up here seeking space, light, and perspective.

From here, I look across the rolling Devon landscape, a green patchwork quilt of fields and farms, trees and stories. I look back to our village: the cottages and school, the pub and playing field, the village hall which bears traces of what community has meant to this place. I wonder what clues it holds about the literal and figurative village that it will supposedly take to raise my daughter. I want to know where this village is because I am also anxious. I am anxious about where online spaces are taking us, about what AI will mean for my daughter and the world, about the rapid deterioration of the climate. I want to know my daughter will be OK facing the uncertainty of a fraying social and environmental fabric. I want her to know who her neighbor is, what it means to belong, how to swap a measure of independence for shared rhythms and care. I am trying to work this out for myself too – how to accept the invitation to community, how to reconcile my restless heart and my desire to belong, how to arrive at the ground beneath my feet.

My maternal family line has rooted in Devon for hundreds of years, if not longer. I grew up in the east of the county, but my husband and I, after moving around the United Kingdom and the world for years following jobs, moved to this village in the agricultural heartland of Devon some years back for affordability. On viewing the house, we caught a view of Dartmoor’s distant folds on the horizon. Dartmoor, a national park, holds an altogether more ancient kind of village. Sometimes I walk there, stabilizing myself in place and time on 3,500-year-old grey-cold granite boulders that mark the remnants of Bronze Age settlements. There are lots of these village remains over the moor. They are scattered granite skeletons that speak of a past togetherness.

A village in Devon. AlanWrigley / Alamy Stock Photo.

As I prepared to give birth, I sought these villages – ancient and modern, local and distant. I read about them, walked in them, imagined life in them. I recalled time I’d spent in villages across Africa – the communality of life being the feeling I remember most clearly: food cooked and shared without asking if someone needed it, children roaming between houses, biological family hard to identify. Many of the Western baby and birth books I read focused not on villages and togetherness though, but – either explicitly or not – on the challenges and schedules of parenthood, and on the seemingly single unit of the mother-baby. But anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, in her book Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding, explains how our ancestors, since the Pleistocene, developed a unique need and ability to care and cooperate. It has always taken a village to raise a child, it has always taken care to become who we are.

I am learning about these villages, and seeking them, but the truth is that I am finding it hard to be part of one, despite working with communities locally and globally for two decades. It has taken motherhood to make me realize I was never meant to do it all alone. But alone is how I have felt at times as a new mother. And so have others.

From early hominins to village dwellers on Dartmoor to recent years, I am learning how togetherness and place and cooperation have supported the development of individuals and communities. We are group-loving beings but many of us have been wrenched from our villages, from interdependency, into a modern world that is bending us into new forms. Mothering, parenting, caring in this context is hard because we were not supposed to do it this way. I want to re-village, and I am wondering what that means today.

I love to believe that I am seeking an interdependent, communal life, like those I admire from a distance who are choosing cohousing arrangements or hosting community meals. I imagine living like the early Christians in the Book of Acts, where “all the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.” How beautiful. But honestly, I think I like the idea more than I would the reality. Because being fully with others can be, well, inconvenient and frustrating. Some days, I avoid my neighbors to evade obligatory small talk. Some days, community can feel like a chore because of fault lines – political, theological, economic, historical. Lately, conversations about work, elections, parenting styles, about Gaza and Israel, have made these fault lines shift and tremble. In those moments, the safety and seclusion of four walls is appealing. But isolation is only ever a temporary fix to the challenge of others. And it is never a fix to the challenge of self.

How then do we create the close social bonds, the face-to-face existence that, according to Susan Pinker, author of The Village Effect: Why Face-to-Face Contact Matters, makes us happier and healthier? How do we make space for this when so many of us live by our own schedules? How do we do it when the self is encouraged over interdependence, when modern life carves up communities, when the tethers that once existed between people, and between people and place, are coming undone?

The late essayist Barry Lopez, despite traveling the world, said his favorite landscape was around his home in Oregon. He writes: “I’m happy in this undemonstrative, rural place. In my conversations with it I know, once more, who I am…. If I want the comfort of intimacy with it, of integration and acceptance, my only choice is participation – to learn from it by participating … of not opting for the expediency of detachment.”

Some days, detachment is all I want. But keeping care within the four walls of our little family feels like hoarding, especially now, when the world so badly needs care. When my husband and I became parents, we were held in a web of care. We had meals brought to us, second-hand baby equipment given, shopping fetched. Once, we walked outside to find one of our neighbors on our roof, ladder held in place by another neighbor. They were replacing some slipped tiles. We hadn’t asked them to. We received, and we were grateful. And we try to give, too, and to live the Trinity’s three-in-oneness that shows us how to be fully ourselves by being fully with others. I think that in this time of social, environmental, technological, and spiritual upheaval, we will need to understand words like interdependence. We will need to understand how to dwell, how to relate to our neighbors and our places. We will need to become aware of, and restore, the ecologies of care – of love – that we have always depended on.

If I want integration and belonging, then perhaps participation is the way. Participation as an elected district councilor helped me to begin my relationship with this place. I’d listen to residents – sometimes joyfully, sometimes jaded, always curious – at countless parish meetings and in freezing village halls across the area I served; advocate on their behalf at committee meetings; go for walks and talks with them; plant trees with them, sinking literal and figurative roots into our shared red soil. Jim, who is a farmer and politically distant to me, has evolved from acquaintance to friend via Land Rover drives, cider, and honest conversations about our real lives. On paper we should not have been friends. In place, and through encounter, we can be. Participation has helped me get to know people and stories, strengths and needs, the past and possible futures.

At its loneliest, motherhood has felt like a ripping away of that sense of participation, my days now focused on my own household’s needs and plans. This is important and often isolating work.

Sometimes, I feel I am participating online more than in person. I click on Instagram – it repels me, it draws me. I reply to a message from a woman I only know through these digital squares. She is a mother and a writer, and in recent months I have found reassurance and connection with her and others in this digital space in a way I haven’t from some real-life relationships. For many, online spaces are community, a source of connection in an often isolating society. Digital connections with like-minded people have, at times, helped me feel more like myself.

But I want community to be about more than shared interests, more than a group of like-minded people, the ease of which is often tempting. I wonder whether it is more about co-located people, people who have a stake in the life of a place. Poet and essayist Gary Snyder speaks about a community being a group of people who share a watershed, versus a network, which can be more diffuse. Being co-located is about living alongside and being shaped by people who are not like us, which can be uncomfortable. But fault lines can become opportunities for encounter if we’re prepared to sit and listen and perhaps even be changed. Through our encounter, Jim helped me to understand things: the role of tradition in a community, and the primacy of relationship over political leaning in creating change.

A community is as unique as the place where it exists. The village I am seeking is people but also landscape, and social infrastructure, and the life-giving space between these things. It is roots and branches, a collective grounding in place and reaching for light.

My experiences as a councilor, a charity worker, and now a mother lead me to think that we are at a crossroads when it comes to how we participate in and build the village and future we want – how society values and integrates community, family, and civic life. I see way markers, though, like the libraries in Europe that exist as city living rooms more than just a book-borrowing service. These are “third spaces” – spaces that are separate from our home (the first place) and workplace (second place), like cafes, churches, markets, libraries, parks. These spaces act as anchors in a place, argues Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place. They are important for civic engagement, democracy, and a sense of belonging, and they broaden our interactions. They are accessible and they are leveling. As the director of Helsinki’s library says, “business people, families with babies, students, homeless people – all fit within the same walls.”

But these spaces are getting harder to come by in the United Kingdom. Public libraries are closing down for lack of funding (around one fifth have closed since 2010), people are spending less time outdoors, churches are losing members, cafés are a luxury for many. Our large regional library in Exeter was taken over by a business and managed to keep its doors open, and it is a space that welcomes everyone. It is hard to name other free spaces where, as a mother, I can go and meet new people. I am tired of mother and toddler groups, appreciating the emotional connection with other mothers but often craving something other than the toys, the songs, the same conversations about meals, schedules, sleep.

Re-villaging will involve thoughtfully designing the institutions and networks of care that we need. This could mean making towns walkable, so that new housing developments are not stuck out on their own, necessitating the need for a car. It could mean re-opening libraries (and with them, the imagination they unlock). The US Surgeon General’s 2023 report on loneliness emphasizes the need to strengthen America’s “social infrastructure” – which can include public resources such as libraries and parks as well as sports venues and transport networks – alongside programs and policies that promote connection. Re-villaging might also look to the church for guidance. Church is what I most imagine – most hope – community could be: a flawed group of people who choose to stay together despite differences. I don’t think there are many other places where that happens, and I think the church needs to face outward, make its edges more porous, and welcome the community-curious as much as the Christian-curious.

Re-villaging is in part about structures, access, institutions, funding, policies. But these things can, I think, also become a distraction to avoid the deeper work of facing who we are and who we’re becoming. In my work, I’ve seen the relative ease of focusing on process and programs versus the challenge of facing ourselves. Re-villaging needs public support, but it is also as earthy as digging my hands into soil at the allotment, as rambling as conversations with neighbors, as inconvenient as choosing encounters on public transport instead of the convenience of my car. It is about shared meaning, about curiosity, about cultural ecology. It is about trust in each other even when there are forces and companies that would rather we put that trust in them. I am finding it hard, and life-giving.

Recently, our village hall hosted a conversation about the future of this place. There were big sheets of flipchart paper, pens, Post-it notes, and everyone was invited to contribute ideas about work, homes, green spaces, leisure, transport, and more. By the end, the Post-it notes fluttered and flapped like leaves on a tree. There are so many people who want to participate, who want to shape their place. Often people don’t join in because they don’t know how. The formal processes of government can be cumbersome, deliberately uninviting. But placemaking and community building can be as simple as pens, paper, an invitation.

I look out the window, across to Dartmoor. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Conan Doyle says of the place: “You are conscious everywhere of the homes and the work of prehistoric people … the strange thing is that they should have lived so thickly on what must always have been most unfruitful soil.”

I wonder how we might choose to “live thickly” on the often unfruitful soil of modern life. I am drawn to and challenged by this necessity of commitment to a place and to a community. I think it is the thing that has always tethered us – in hunter-gatherer groups, in Bronze Age villages, in pre-industrial villages. The independence and rootlessness of the past hundred or so years may be an anomaly in the story of human communities. Now, my daughter is asking me to participate – not just in this place with its people and institutions, but also in our past and future selves. She is asking me to re-village not in theory, but as messily and abundantly as the ancient hedgerow outside my window. She is asking me to face my discomfort, to face my neighbors, to face the village and help call it forth. It will raise her, and – I am realizing – me, and all of us too.