Country life, in every aspect, has changed more rapidly and more dramatically within living memory than at any other time in our history. Here Valerie Porter looks back at a vanished rural past, to a time many of us may yearn for, but with realism - for what was it really like to live in the countryside without so many of the mod cons we now take for granted? The book also contains interviews with those who can remember a way of life in rural Britain before mechanization changed the countryside forever. Porter also looks at the present, and in defiance of rose-tinted nostalgia sees how in many respects country life is thriving, albeit in a different form from its traditional image.