Since we’ve moved to Beechworth we’ve been making some use of the streaming box that our ISP included in the bundle, and one of the things we’ve been watching is 1864 Denmark’s War about the second Schleswig war.

Now, I know almost nothing about Danish history in the nineteenth century, but the production values for the tv series appear to be high so I’m going to assume that the representations of rural life, are not that unrealistic, even if the reality was smellier and more squalid.

The interesting thing is how similar the representation of rural life is to the descriptions of rural life in Scotland at the same time, both through novels such as ‘Sunset Song‘ and historical works such as David Kerr Cameron’s Cornkister Days.

Which of course begs the question as to how similar (or dissimilar) rural life was for people in northern Europe before the impact of industrialistation …