10/11/2024
Upper Slaughter is one of some 53 settlements in the UK whose members of the armed forces survived the mass slaughter of the First World War, from 1914–1918. All Upper Slaughter residents who served in the conflict returned home safely – remarkable given the Great War cost the lives of around 886,000 UK military personnel (6% of the adult male population, according to UK Parliament data).
These settlements were retrospectively dubbed ‘thankful villages’ (also known as ‘blessed villages’) by the writer Arthur Mee in a series of guides to the English counties published in the 1930s, collectively known as The King’s England. There’s not a single such village in Scotland or Ireland; the latter was still part of the United Kingdom until its partition in 1922.
“It is incredibly rare to find a village that has no war memorial,” says Fred Mawer, a Blue Badge tour guide in the south west of England. “But in Somerset there are nine thankful villages, more than any other English county.
Taken from BBC Country File magazine
