Walk around the North Yorkshire village of Thornton-le-Dale and the word that comes most readily to mind is genteel. Located on the edge of the North York Moors national park, it boasts the sort of thatched cottages that are evocatively familiar from chocolate boxes. A pretty stream flows slowly through the streets as a stately game of bowls is played amid the sleepy splendour of the local bowling green.
Yet all is not quite as it seems in this sedate corner of rural England. Stories have emerged in the local press of a bitter dispute between some residents and members of the parish council, a vote of no confidence, dark claims that a clerk was hounded out of her job, and grumblings about how the grass is cut.
It’s a tale that combines arguments over ailing cherry trees with deep distrust of newcomers, as if The Archers had been crossed with The Wicker Man.
Not since Jackie Weaver was informed that she had “no authority here”, in the Zoom meeting of Handforth parish council that went viral during lockdown, has a spotlight been cast so harshly on the workings of local democracy.
A fortnight ago, an extraordinary poll was held to determine whether villagers wanted to dissolve the parish council and elect another.
Some 244 people voted, with 180 in favour of dissolution and just 64 supporting the current council. However, the parish council chose to dismiss the result as “undemocratic”, because only 16% of the village electorate voted.
“Local elections have notoriously low turnouts,” counters Sandra Bell, the former chair of the parish council. “The point is that 74% voted for the motion.”
On YouTube it’s possible to see a series of Thornton-le-Dale’s bad-tempered parish council meetings which, almost in homage to Handforth, never seem to progress beyond matters of procedure.
The person who has filmed the meetings and put them online is Janet Sanderson, a local Conservative councillor on North Yorkshire council and a resident in Thornton-le-Dale.
She took this step, she says, in an effort to curb the poor behaviour of some parish councillors, who she claims made slanderous statements that could incur legal action. “If they see that the films are going to be public,” she says, “they might stop slandering people in public. It would be funny if it wasn’t so very destructive and damaging.”
In an effort to escape the camera’s attentions, some of the parish councillors have taken to hiding their faces behind sheets of paper.
The current chair of the parish council is Marguerite Markham, who replaced Bell in a bloodless coup in May. In a statement she issued following the vote of no confidence, she pleaded with villagers “to come and talk to the council before going to the press or using social media to criticise the council”.
I meet Markham outside Moore’s deli, just along from the village green, where she invites along several of her co-councillors and supporters to criticise their perceived enemies to the press.
Markham believes that Sanderson “has got her people in her pocket that she wants to run the council” and that Bell is in cahoots with her. “That’s an absolute lie,” says Bell. “I have no contact with Janet.”
One of Markham’s supporters is 78-year-old Dave Algar – few if any of the main protagonists will see 65 again. He maintains that Bell ran a “dictatorship”, while Markham speaks of Sanderson “brainwashing” the villagers who voted for dissolution.
This kind of language, which summons up images of gulags and concentration camps, is not easy to reconcile with a body whose remit is limited to the maintenance of the village green, allotments and the cemetery.
But Algar is adamant that he is fighting to protect a way of life that is under existential threat from “a few individuals, most of whom have only been in the village a few years”.
“Newbies!” snaps Markham, pulling a disapproving face.
Underlying the heated debates about grass cutting is the question of insiders and outsiders. “The people that move here from down south and think they know it all and want to change everything,” Markham clarifies.
Walking around the village, I meet Ben Chaplin, a long-term inhabitant who laments the expanding population and yearns for quieter days, as if the tranquil village green has become Piccadilly Circus.
Further along, I encounter a woman who wants to conceal her identity for fear of the repercussions. She moved to Thornton-le-Dale over 15 years ago, she says, but has never been fully accepted. “Some people have been actively unfriendly. Others let you know that you can never really be ‘one of us’.”
The trend for southerners moving north increased during the pandemic, when remote working made country living more viable. It has driven up house prices, but it has also brought in newcomers who are keen to help around the village.
There is a voluntary group called the Hub that concerns itself with litter collection and other matters. Markham speaks about it as if it were a sinister entryist organisation, somewhere between Spectre and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.
“They want us out,” she says. “And now they’re on the village hall committee and they’re trying to change all that. This village 30 years ago was lovely. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody helped everybody. Now there’s a rift.”
“It’s so discriminatory,” responds Sanderson, “the way they ask ‘how long have you been in the village?’”
Bell, a former science teacher, has been here for 40 years and is mystified by the animosity. “There’s a part of me that thinks: surely we can still get together and have some kind of sensible discussion,” she says. “But I don’t understand where the anger comes from.”
