Why? Well, we were so surprised about the CRPRE's comments, we looked a little deeper into what they were doing, as you would expect that we should have a lot of common ground. Superficially, that view is correct. Living and working in the countryside we share many common interests with the CPRE in the countryside itself, farming and rural industry, housing and rural planning, energy and waste management.
However, when you scratch away the surface veneer, you find a huge difference. There are those who realise that since man was a hunter-gatherer (and what better place to talk about such things as here, in the shadow of Stonehenge) the relationship of man with the countryside has been one of constant and massive change. Change that was essential to the life and development not only of the local communities, but the whole country and our national and international interests. Most folk who live and work in the countryside seem to understand that need for change intuitively and embrace it. We call them countryfolk.
On the other hand, you have those who wish to preserve an unchanging and unchangeable version of an idealised view of what the English countryside should be - and impose that view on everyone else. It seems that many in the CPRE might fall into that category; and particularly when it comes to roads.
Many supporters of this philosophy don't actually live in the countryside, you can't really class those who have second homes here, or who only visit once in a Preston Guild, as true countryfolk. Wearing a flat cap, or green wellies, or driving a Land Rover round central London doesn't make you countryfolk either. We get the feeling that too many of those pushing these ideas of chocolate box stasis and preservation might better be described as countryfauk; faux countryfolk who are apt to be the first to complain about mud/rain/grass/smells, etc in the countryside. The ones who bemoan the lack of "culture". The first to moan to parish councils about the noise of crowing cockerels, the first to start petitions to halt the chiming of rural clocks and those whose whines outdo the Sunday tintinnabulators - whose hobby they would stop. In other words, the archetypal rural NIMBYs.
Must come as shock to countryfauk that many countryfolk actually embrace rural change. Some of us are even IMBYs.
