“Beset by an ever-quickening pace of life, city-dwellers sometimes lament the loss of simpler times and contact. They needn’t, writes village-dweller Marguerite Winter.

A short-break bolthole for weary city folk, along with a retirement option as well. Every state has its equivalent of the NSW Southern Highlands, where holiday homes became the places people retired to and substantial towns grew up around them.

But there are those rare few others, which centre on a village rather than a town and offer gently calibrated differences that can enhance the latter years of our lives. Their advantages are many, as 21st century life in one tiny hamlet in the south-eastern corner of the lower Hunter Valley might illustrate.”