Thankful Village

Tucked away in the rural north west of Hertforshire, a handful of houses, a scattering of farms and a church make up the village of Puttenham. It has probably changed very little over the past 99 years.

Unlike the vast majority of villages, there is no war memorial here, for Puttenham is a 'Thankful Village' - one of only 53 in the UK. Where every one of those who went to fight in the First World War came home.

This morning I went to the church there to pay my own respects to those who, although they returned, would have carried injuries and mental pain for the rest of their lives.

Let us not only remember the fallen, today on Remembrance Sunday, but also those who return and carry their burden for life.


Thankful Villages (also known as Blessed Villages) are settlements in both England and Wales from which all their then members of the armed forces survived World War I. The term Thankful Village was popularised by the writer Arthur Mee in the 1930s. In Enchanted Land (1936), the introductory volume to The King’s England series of guides, he wrote that a Thankful Village was one which had lost no men in the Great War because all those who left to serve came home again. His initial list identified 32 villages.