Downley

Downley is a village in the Chiltern Hills on the strict understanding that nobody looks down the slope, where High Wycombe has been climbing up to meet it for years and has more or less arrived. The common at the top still behaves like the countryside, with a seventeenth-century pub once used by Welsh drovers walking to London and a shoot on Saturdays in season. Below it, the post-war closes behave like the outskirts of a town. Locals have three nicknames for that pub and one firm word for where they live, and the word is village.