A village green is a common open area within a settlement. Traditionally, a village green was often common grassland at the centre of an agricultural or other rural settlement, and was used for grazing. Some also have a pond, often originally for watering stock such as cattle.
The village green also provided, and may still provide, an open air meeting place for the local people, which may be used for public celebrations such as May Day festivities.
The term village green evokes a grassy rural environment. However the term is used more broadly to encompass woodland, moorland, sports grounds, and even—in part—buildings and roads. The green may also be positioned away from the centre of the village, especially if the village has moved, or been absorbed into a larger settlement.
Read more about Village Green: Distribution, Town and Village Greens, Examples
Famous quotes containing the words village and/or green:
“A village seems thus, where its able-bodied men are all plowing the ocean together, as a common field. In North Truro the women and girls may sit at their doors, and see where their husbands and brothers are harvesting their mackerel fifteen or twenty miles off, on the sea, with hundreds of white harvest wagons, just as in the country the farmers’ wives sometimes see their husbands working in a distant hillside field. But the sound of no dinner-horn can reach the fisher’s ear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairyland. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry ... like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)