What makes it onto Villagly

Villagly lists the events that make a village worth the journey. Not everything that happens in the countryside. The things worth turning up for.

Here is what we look for.

It belongs to a village. The test is the community the event serves, not just where the postcode sits. A fete on the green that the whole parish has built, a county show that brings the surrounding farms together, a market town that wears its history and character on its sleeve, all in. A travelling circus that happens to be in the countryside this week but could be anywhere, less so. Cities sit this one out.

It has a day you can turn up on. We list events, things with a date. A garden, a model village or a museum that opens all season is a place to visit, not a one-day event, and places have their own home on Villagly. But when that garden runs a snowdrop weekend, or that museum lays on a guided tour with the local reenactment troop, that has a date, and that we list.

It is the kind of thing the big sites skip. The fete, the farmers market, the folk weekend, the well dressing, the shin kicking that has run since 1612. The national listings will not touch most of this. The agricultural directories stop at the livestock. We go to the parts they leave out.

Go weirdly. Cheese rolling, worm charming, gravy wrestling, a man dressed head to foot in straw led through town and burned the next day (a straw one, not a real one). The bizarre and the wonderful are not a sideshow here, they are the point. We think the bog snorkelling matters as much as the cathedral.

What we tend to leave out: city and big-town events with no village in them, theme parks, and anything that feels more like commerce than community.

If you run a village event, then you are Proudly Villagly. We want it on here. Tell us what it is, where, and when, and we will write up why it is wonderful. The clearer the date, the sooner it goes live.