As Miss Marple knew well, life in an English village is rarely dull

Thank goodness for Lavenham. It was a chance visit to this Suffolk village that stopped the teenage Andrew Lloyd-webber from ending it all, as he has revealed in his forthcoming memoir.

It doesn’t seem at all overstated. Villages do touch the heart, lift the spirits and banish life’s demons. Now that the snowdrops are out, spring can be only weeks away, with all the promise of the countryside coming out of hibernation.

There will be apple blossom and scarecrow festivals, house martins and cricket, with homemade cake at half-time. I’m smiling already. How does the village work its magic?

Some are beautiful, of course. Lavenham, with its wooden guildhall, built shortly after the foundation of the Guild of Corpus Christi in 1529, is a case in point. So is Blanchland, on the border of County Durham: it grew up in the ruins of a monastery; indeed, it derives its name from the white habits of the monks. Or Fordwich, once the port for Canterbury until the Wantsum Channel silted up, and now left with a 16th-century town hall, a population of 400 and a notable gastropub.

But beautiful or not, villages – as these examples show – are very different one from another, not least because building materials vary so much as you go around the country. It’s Britain’s geology that we have to thank for this. Teetering on the edge of a continent, these islands were smashed, pummelled and pounded by the shifting of the earth’s plates.

Result: an unusually complex pattern of rocks and soils. In the days when people built with what they had to hand, this mattered. Limestone, sandstone, granite, flint, clunch, wood, brick, thatch, tile, slate – villages use them all, depending on location.

For instance, Weobley, in the Welsh Marches, is a wibbly-wobbly study in black and white, because there was no good stone to build with. Zennor, in Cornwall, was described as “a tiny granite village” by DH Lawrence, who escaped there during the First World War. But as Lawrence found and Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple knew, village life is not always as harmonious as the surroundings.

Don’t think you’ll get privacy in a cottage. Little escapes scrutiny or comment from your neighbours. But this can be good as well as bad. People help each other out (they have to, there may not be many local services). They keep an eye on the elderly and baby-sit the young.

Small enough to be cosy, villages can be a sufficient size to contain a creative mix of talents. I don’t suppose it was the offering of yoga classes and flower shows advertised on the village noticeboard that stopped Lord Lloyd-webber from doing himself in, but surprising amounts of inventiveness and ingenuity can go into village amusements, like the summer fête or steam rally.

Oh, I know, chocolatebox villages can be overprecious. But the real village spirit is informal, epitomised by the produce you see displayed on wayside shrines, which is bought by dropping a coin into a jam jar. Villagers don’t tear down the old, they bodge and repair. Hence the quirks, which show that generations have followed generations, often in conditions of grinding poverty, but managing to leave their mark.

Thomas Gray’s “rude forefathers of the hamlet” still sleep in the village churchyard, and as for the church itself, what a document to the way human hearts attach themselves to loved places.