After scoring 187 out of 200 last year, Chearsley residents are hoping their steady work will finally earn the Buckinghamshire village its first category win.
Chearsley has entered the Buckinghamshire Best Kept Village Competition for years, but it has never won the Morris Cup, the category for villages with populations between 501 and 1,501.
“We’d love to win,” said John Howard, a parish council officer and chairman of the Chearsley Village Historic Society. “We’re getting better.”
Martin Johnson, known throughout the village as Sheepy, also wanted Chearsley’s efforts to be recognised beyond the people who live there.
“It’s not just us thinking we’ve got a lovely village,” he said. “It’s somebody else thinking it too.”
Judges award 200 marks across categories including the churchyard, green, playground, floral displays, community facilities, hedges, verges, bins and noticeboards. Even the quality of the entry map contributes to the final score.
Chearsley came close in 2019, when it received the Dashwood Trophy, which is automatically awarded to the highest-scoring runner-up who has not won a cup in the previous five years.
Last year, Chearsley scored 187 out of 200 and received a Certificate of Merit. Judges praised its playground, village hall, old pump, spring, public seating and The Bell, its only remaining pub.
They also found no Best Kept Village posters and no mention of the competition on the village website.
This year, both are visible.
Preparing for the judges
Founded in 1957, the competition encourages communities across Buckinghamshire to care for their shared spaces.
Clive Parker, its organiser, said entrants are sometimes separated by only one or two marks. Judges are looking for the village that has gone “a little bit further”.
Twenty marks are awarded for evidence that residents have engaged with the competition. The remaining marks cover the condition and appearance of public spaces, from seating and verges to litter and dog fouling.
Judging takes place between 1 June and 14 July, but villages are not told when the judges will arrive. During those six weeks, an unfamiliar car moving slowly through Chearsley may be completely innocent, or it may contain two people quietly deciding the fate of Morris Cup.
Parker described the competition as “competitive, but still with a happy face”. Every entrant receives feedback, which many villages use before trying again the following year.
Judging, he acknowledged, “could never be an exact science”.
In Chearsley, last year’s comments have prompted more publicity. Residents have also been encouraged to look at the banks, verges and frontages near their homes and consider whether anything needs attention.
“We’re in this together,” John said. “The council will do their bit.”
The rest comes down to the small things people notice around them, whether that is litter on an approach road or an overgrown patch beside a house.
Putting Chearsley on the map
The village noticeboard now carries the official competition poster alongside parish information, church services, the Chearsley Show and Crendon Fest.
Alicia Howard designs some of the posters displayed around Chearsley, as well as the village flag, and paints scenes of the place for residents’ homes.
One of her paintings gathers the church, The Bell, cricket pavilion, playground, allotments, war memorial and wildlife around a large chestnut tree. It is an affectionate inventory of the places residents recognise as home.
Her husband, John, has spent years collecting stories about the village. One place carried a story, which led to a person, which led to an event, which led to another part of the village worth knowing.
The village’s physical appeal is easy to see. Cottages sit close to the roads, hedges fold around gardens and views open towards fields or the church tower.
John’s aim is for Chearsley to look cared for while remaining recognisably lived in.
“We don’t want a totally manicured look,” he said.
The parish council has taken on more responsibility for maintenance in recent years, including work on the verges and installing new benches, but John’s attachment to Chearsley reaches well beyond the competition.
“I’m very happy in the community,” he said. ‘We’ve decided to remain in the village. I have no wish to move on.”
Some of the maintenance is carried out by a volunteer group with a less formal name: The Lawnmower Men.
The Lawnmower Men
Sheepy moved to Chearsley 17 years ago with his wife, Paula Johnson, who is involved with the village hall. They wanted somewhere safe and welcoming to raise their daughters, and he now serves on the parish council.
Did the village live up to their hopes?
“Oh, God, yeah,” he said. “Everything we hoped it would be.”
He compared the village to The Vicar of Dibley, pointing to the Morris dancing, quizzes, bingo nights, cricket matches and church events that fill Chearsley’s calendar. At certain times of the year, he said, somebody could be “parachuted into the pub” and find almost anything happening.
He was just as fond of the village when nothing was happening at all.
“You can just stroll around the village, see the sunken lanes, see the church, see the hedgerow,” he said. “It’s just beautiful.”
St Nicholas’ Church stands along that route, and it’s churchyard is maintained partly by the Lawnmower Men, whose members include Sheepy and John, amongst others.
Every fortnight during the grass-cutting season, the men gather in matching T-shirts reading: “Sexy and I mow it.” The slogan does most of the showing off; the men themselves cut the grass, tidy the church yard, and finish with a pint at The Bell.
“The village only works if people get involved,” Sheepy said.
That principle appears throughout Chearsley.
At a recent event called Ready Teddy Go, volunteers in the church tower attached children’s soft toys to a zip wire and sent them back towards the ground, where John recorded and announced each arrival.
Around 40 animals took part, although only about 10 were bears. The rest ranged from dogs, dinosaurs and meerkats, which John admitted might eventually force a rethink of the name.
The Historic Society’s Made in Chearsley trail also brought around 100 visitors through seven locations connected to the village’s rural past, with demonstrations of lacemaking, baking and farming.
The cricket club runs adult and junior teams, along with the Chearsley Chicks women’s softball. A mother-and-baby group helps younger families meet, newer residents are reviving the allotments, and the village hall was made possible through fundraising, grants and local support.
When something needs doing, somebody usually steps forward.
‘The hub that we all return to’
Most of Chearsley’s residents eventually find themselves back at The Bell.
The building began as a cottage before becoming an inn in the 1600s. Today it is one of the few remaining public spaces where village life can gather.
On a Friday evening, the tables outside fill with families, parish councillors and people who have moved away but returned for the weekend.
Grace Johnson, 24, has lived in Chearsley since 2009. Her family quickly became part of a close-knit group of local households, with friendships forming early and lasting into adulthood.
“You grow up together from being young kids all the way through to people I’m still friends with now,” she said.
For Grace’s generation, working at The Bell is almost a rite of passage. Teenagers begin there at 15 or 16, leave for university or work at weekends and during holidays.
“It’s sort of the hub that we all return to forever, really,” she said.
It also sits amongst the ghosts of Chearsley amenities past. The village once had a school and a shop and Grace said residents deliberately meet at the pub because they understand that supporting it means using it.
Her generation may be less involved in formal committees, but they still take part. Grace once stepped in to run a samosa stall during an emergency, while her friends have helped with parking at village events.
“What we do have is pretty special,” she said. “I just don’t think any village can compare to the feeling of Chearsley.”
“That’s something you can’t really score in a competition.”
At another table were Nic Brown and Nick Richards, known locally as Chearsley’s former and current mayors.
Nic chaired the parish council for 25 years, much of it spent encouraging people to get involved. For him, the competition is about residents and the parish council working together to make Chearsley “even more special.”
Nick Richards has lived in Chearsley for 27 years and raised both his children there. After so long in Chearsley, he felt it was time to take on more responsibility.
“I thought it was about time to step up and help the village that I love,” he said.
He was particularly keen for the village to make a serious effort in the competition.
“We are very proud of it,” he said. “We would love just to have a little bit of recognition from the powers that be.”
A friendly rivalry
There remains the matter of Cuddington.
The neighbouring village lies around a mile and a half away and has won the Morris Cup 16 times.
The friendly rivalry between the two villages has been long recorded and not limited to BBKV.
In 1978, representatives from both villages agreed rules for an annual tug-of-war across the River Thame.
Eight residents competed on each side, with the first team to win two pulls taking the contest. Chearsley’s village history records that Cuddington did not win during the nine years the event ran.
Its performance in Best Kept Village has been rather more successful.
Many Chearsley children attend school in Cuddington, and Sheepy said far more connects the villages than divides them.
John was equally generous.
“Good luck to Cuddington,” he said. “I admire them. Perhaps we ought to learn a bit from them.”
Chearsley would, nevertheless, still like its turn.
When Sheepy learnt how often Cuddington had won the cup, he declined an offer to see the full list.
“Many times? No, I don’t want to know,” he said, laughing. “That would upset me too much.”
When the conversation returned to Chearsley itself, he knew exactly what he wanted the judges to remember.
“Six forty-five on a warm sunny evening, standing on the green, looking at The Bell.”
At that hour, the evening light catches The Bell as the tables outside begin to fill. People who have moved away fall back into old conversations, and the whole village seems to gather in one place.
This summer, Chearsley has put its best verge forward once again and hope that the judges find the extra mark or two it has been missing.
Featured image credit: Isabella van der Putten
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