Akenfield

The central character Tom is a young man living in a cottage with his widowed mother in the 1970s, in a Suffolk village (the fictitious Akenfield).

The film of Akenfield was made on location in the villages just west of Wickham Market, notably Hoo, Debach, Charsfield, Monewden, Dallinghoo, Letheringham, Burgh and Pettistree.

The actors in the film were non-professional, drawn from the local population, and therefore speak with authentic accents and play their parts in a manner unaffected by the habit of stage or screen performance.

The director's father, Reg Hall, a station master born in Bury St Edmunds, appears briefly as the village policeman walking down a lane with a bicycle.

Ronald Blythe's book Akenfield is a gritty work of hard scholarship, rooted in detailed statistical data, presenting a very realistic grounded understanding of the economic and social life of a village.

Blythe had spent the winter of 1966–7 listening to three generations of his Suffolk neighbours in the villages of Charsfield and Debach, recording their views on education, class, welfare, religion, farming and also death.

Published in 1969, the book painted a picture of country living at a time of change – its stories told in the voices of the farmers and villagers themselves.

[3] One of the major challenges of the filming was to recreate the sense of a rural economy based around horses; Blythe considered one of the best scenes the evocation of a harvest around 1911, complete with "Suffolk waggons, the biggest in England, and heroic punches to draw them".