England's pastoral paradise lost?

This village, a stone's throw from the birthplace of William Shakespeare, is postcard- perfect. There are rolling fields, undulating country lanes, thatched cottages, and a rugged Norman church. It's the rural idyll that inspired some of Britain's finest poets.

But behind the Cotswold stone and half-timbered exteriors lurks a malaise. Country life is seriously threatened.

Across Britain, shops, post offices, banks, and even pubs are shutting at alarming rates. Transport links are becoming fitful. Local farms, squeezed by bulk-purchasing supermarkets, are on their knees. And wealthy second-home buyers are driving up home prices beyond the reach of locals.

The result is that deprivation is now stalking the countryside. For all its pockets of affluence, rural Britain is home to 3 million people who live below the poverty threshold, according to one recent study.

"Certainly some aspects of life in rural Britain are under threat," says Quintin Fox, head of consultancy at the Plunkett Foundation, a charity that works to improve life for rural residents.

The problem is essentially one of big driving out small. Banking giants bought out smaller networks and promptly closed down those little, inefficient branches that glued communities together.

The money-losing national postal service has shut thousands of costly post offices - vital centers that dispense an array of administrative services from mail to social welfare benefits. Mammoth supermarkets have proliferated, squeezing out local retailers. Privatized transport networks circumvent undersubscribed routes.

"You are getting a gradual erosion of local services, banks, post offices, corner stores, news agents, lots of things piling up on top of each other which lead communities to a tipping point," says Andrew Simms, policy director for the New Economics Foundation (NEF), a London-based think tank that has conducted extensive research into what it calls "ghost-town Britain." "It's self- reinforcing because once people can no longer get goods and services from local communities, the greater the incentive to go to the big out-of-town superstores."

According to NEF, a general store shuts every day somewhere in Britain, a third of banks have been shut in the past decade, and 1 in 5 post offices has closed in the past 20 years.

Locals tell a story of benign neglect. Norman Wilson used to run the post office in Tibenham, in eastern England. In recent years, he says, the school closed, the last village shop shut, and the post office was squeezed into submission by the national postal authorities.

"Now, we have a community hall, a public house, and a church. That's it," he says. "If you go back to the mid-19th century, there were seven pubs and two dozen shops and double the number of people."

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