Rita Cruise O'Brien

Together Rita Cruise O'Brien

Dorset: what lies behind village life? TOGETHER follows in the great tradition of English village studies. Owermoigne has 470 inhabitants a few miles from the famed coastline, Thomas Hardy's birthplace and the county town of Dorchester. Owermoigne, a Celtic-Norman name has distant origins beginning with the local Iron Age tribes and the Romans. The book traces the long history of the locality which was granted as a feudal estate to a Norman knight after 1066. It recounts the hardship of local farming which led to the founding of the first agricultural trade union at Tolpuddle, a few miles from the village. This contemporary portrait of the village based on seventy interviews gives the book its title. TOGETHER describes the vibrant social life of a modern Dorset village without a pub, shop or post office. Much can be gained by people joining together to do things, called social capital in policy and scholarly circles. It is plentiful in Owermoigne. In contrast to the concerns of successive British governments about rural isolation in the last thirty years, the village is not a backwater of boredom and inactivity, just the opposite. Read how it was done, how it is sustained and how a critical dispute was finally resolved. Rita Cruise O'Brien has had a home in Owermoigne for eighteen years. She and her husband, Donal, found the people most welcoming despite being second home owners and Irish and American in origin. She has worked in universities, consulting and business and published four previous books. He book, TRUST: Releasing the Energy to Succeed, Wiley, 2001, examines why trust is vital to competitive advantage in British industry. Trust has also been very important to sustaining long lasting relationships in the village, no better demonstrated than when it is tested.