Bicknacre

Bicknacre spent most of its history as a place where monks prayed and farmers drank, and the drinking won: the priory is down to one arch in a field, and the pubs only started closing when people bought them to live in. When someone proposed burying the farmland under a small town's worth of new houses, the parish council took a century-long lease on the fields and gave them to the village, which is about as clear a welcome mat as a place can put out. Rumour has it the old churchyard is haunted by a man nobody can name, and in Bicknacre that still makes him a newcomer.