KENTISBEARE, ENGLAND — Last summer, the tranquil English village of Kentisbeare woke up to find a dagger piercing its heart.
The man who ran the neighborhood pub, the Wyndham Arms, had decided to call it quits. Hit by hard times, he locked up one evening and never came back, leaving the village bereft of its "local," the watering hole down the road where, for more than 200 years, the good folk here could always drop in for a pint, a pie or a piece of gossip.
The tavern seemed destined to become yet another lost marker of traditional village life, bound for the same remorseless oblivion that had already swallowed the baker's, the butcher's and the petrol station in this lazy green countryside where bluebells nod in the breeze, medieval church towers loom like giant chess pieces and thatched roofs peek coyly through the leaves.
This time, though, residents drew a line. They retrieved the keys to the pub, renovated the whitewashed 16th century building themselves and reopened it less than two months later.
"People couldn't bear the thought of it being boarded up," said Mavis Durrant, 67, a lifelong resident of the village in southwestern England. "There's something very appealing about a country pub, isn't there?"
Indeed. For centuries, virtually nothing has been more central to the good cheer and cozy charm of English village life than the local pub, whose name alone -- the Bishop's Finger, the Drunken Duck, the Quiet Woman, the Moorend Spout -- could summon a smile.
But feel-good stories like the rescue of the Wyndham Arms are rare these days, because pubs are closing down across Britain faster than a thirsty man can down a pint. Colorful and often iconic establishments that managed to survive civil wars, frowning Victorian teetotalism and tales of being haunted are increasingly buckling under to modern market forces, higher taxes and lifestyle changes.
Every week, 39 alehouses call for "last orders" one final time, according to the British Beer and Pub Assn. All told, more than 2,000 taverns have shut down since March of last year, at a cost of 20,000 jobs.
It's an especially distressing turn of events for those in the countryside, who warn that villages may eventually be reduced to little more than rural dormitories, stripped of the shops, services and gathering places that gave them a sense of identity and cohesion.
