About

I wanted to know whether the train was running and whether the river was up, and I did not want to maintain a website to find out. So this one works the other way round: every figure on a village page is read from a live public source, and nothing on it is anybody's job to keep current.

Why it works this way

A village website normally needs a volunteer. Somebody has to type in the events, correct the directory, remember the bin dates and notice when a phone number changes. That is real work, it is unpaid, and when the person doing it moves away or gets tired the site does not announce that it has stopped being true. It just sits there, quietly out of date, looking exactly like a site that works.

So the number of villages you can cover that way is the number of people you can recruit.

This is the other approach. Every figure on a village page is read from a live public source and worked out here, and there is nothing on it that anybody has to keep up to date. The number of villages is then the number of postcodes I can type, which is a much larger number.

The cost of that choice is that the page can only say things that are computable. It cannot tell you the whist drive is on Thursday. It is not trying to.

What it is not

It is not a parish council and it speaks for nobody. It has no minutes, no agendas, no notices and no opinions, and it is not the official record of anything. For that, go to your own parish council.

It does not compete with a village Facebook group either. That is where people talk. This is where you check something.

How to tell whether to believe it

At the foot of every village page there is a panel listing every source, whether it is current, and when it last worked. That panel is deliberately not hidden. A website that has quietly stopped updating looks identical to one that is working, and that is the failure worth catching, so this one makes it visible.

The same thing for every village at once is on the status page. That answers a different question: not whether to believe the page in front of you, but whether the site as a whole is working. It exists because a fault that was starving every village of its river level survived three rounds of adding villages before anybody saw it, and seeing it meant opening sixteen pages and counting.

Where a figure comes from somebody else, it links back to them. Every river level and every rainfall total links to that gauge's own page at the Environment Agency, so you can check that the number here is the number they published. The bin dates link to the council's own calendar for that round.

When something cannot be read, the page says so rather than showing you the last value as though it were current.

Which villages

Eighteen, at the time of writing, all of them within a few miles of each other: sixteen in Dorset and two just over the border in Somerset. That is deliberate. It is easier to tell whether a page is wrong about somewhere you can drive to, and being wrong quietly is the only thing this site really has to avoid.

Whether it goes further depends on whether anybody here finds it useful.

The picture at the top of the list

It is not a photograph. It was generated, and the village in it does not exist: there is no such signpost and no such hill. It is there because a page of links is a cold thing to arrive at, and it is said here because a site that asks you to trust its numbers should not be coy about the one thing on it that is invented.

Who built this

I am Julian Mullins (opens in a new tab) and I live in this valley. That is not a qualification, but it is the reason these particular villages are the ones here: I can drive to all of them and see for myself whether a page is telling the truth about a place.

The name

This site was parishes.uk until September 2026. The name changed because villages already have pages at addresses ending parish.uk, which are nothing to do with this site, and one letter is not enough to tell the two apart. Heathfold is a name that cannot be mistaken for either those or a parish council. Every old address still works and leads to the same page here.

Telling me it is wrong

Please do. Write to hello@heathfold.uk. If a bin date has drifted, a gauge is on the wrong stream, or a page says something about your village that simply is not so, that is worth more to me than any amount of working it out from a distance.

What this site is and is not, formally, is in the terms of use. What it keeps about visitors, which is a count of pages and nothing personal, is in privacy.