he property market has seen better days (transactions fell by an annual 5.7 per cent in June) but one group of people refuses to be tied down: the city dwellers upping sticks and chasing the good life.
Research from Hamptons shows that 94,500 people moved from cities to the countryside last year.
Hamish Lothian, a businessman who was brought up in a village and now lives in Exeter, is so convinced about the superior quality of life in the sticks that he is currently searching for a suitable village to move to with his partner Lucy Carruthers and their children Hamish, two, and Betty, five.
“I want the kids to have the kind of childhood I had, which was quite feral,” says Lothian, 50, who is…