When Andy Smith moved from the Lincolnshire countryside where he grew up, to Rotherham, he immediately longed for a return to his rural life.

“For the first 24 years of my life I lived in a village, and living in a town is a big difference,” said 37-year-old Smith, who was born in Saxilby. “It made me miss village life. So I thought, how can I combine the missing of village life with my passion for geography?”

His answer was to launch a lifelong quest to visit all 10,449 civil parishes in England, documenting his travels via a YouTube channel under a new name – The Village Idiot.

“I’ve done 332 so far, but my enthusiasm is not going to waver, I’ll say that much,” said Smith. “It’s probably going to take me the best part of 25 to 30 years to do it. But as long as I’ve got that enthusiasm, I’m going to just keep pushing and pushing.”

Smith, who also works as a Hermes delivery driver, usually spends three days a week travelling to different parishes, and puts out a new video about a parish every day.

A robot could transform how parcels are delivered in the UK after completing its landmark first journey.

The UK’s first autonomous delivery vehicle transported medical supplies from a pharmacy to a care home in Hounslow, London.  

The electric vehicle, built by Academy of Robotics, uses artificial intelligence and a specially developed package management system to provide contact-free delivery.

It can cover 60 miles fully loaded on a single charge and deliver in city centres and suburban and rural locations.

BARNARD Castle has been revealed as the most affordable rural location to move to.

City life isn’t for everyone. Removal quotes specialists Compare My Move looked at rural locations in England and Wales, comparing data on the quality of life in each town and village to find the top spots for a rural relocation.

The company ranked over 75 rural locations on factors such as average house price, median full-time salary, average sunlight hours and precipitation and wifi speed using data from local authorities, ONS, the Met Office and Zoopla.

Barnard Castle topped the list for the most affordable countryside locations to relocate to, ranking the first cheapest rural area based on average property price. 

The average house price in the County Durham town is £188,327.

It is followed by Ambleside, just an hour and a half drive away from Barnard Castle, where the average house price sits at £198,316.

However, if the North’s weather is not for you and you’re looking for a sunny UK relocation, Chichester should be at the top of your list with 1,920.8 hours of sunlight in an average year. 

When the Museum of English Rural Life reopens this week after a £3m Heritage Lottery-backed redevelopment, it will have all its 25,000 objects on display – plus a new acquisition that came to them by itself. The mouse that crept into a Victorian trap in the stores, and died there while the museum was closed, has been preserved and added to the collection.

“The mouse has become one of our most famous objects,” the senior curator, Isabel Hughes, said. “When the poor little thing was found the tweet went round the world, we even made Canadian television.”

The new displays bring the story of country life up to the present day. The collection was begun in the 1950s when Reading University staff realised how fast the countryside around them was changing, and it now takes in far more than tractors and horse-drawn ploughs. Another new display is a colourful but spectacularly tattered outfit worn by the environmental campaigner Jim Hindle, when he camped in a treehouse in an attempt to stop the building of the Newbury bypass in Berkshire. The nine-mile (14km) stretch of road required the felling of 10,000 trees, and in 1996 Hindle camped in the branches of one of them, the Middle Oak. The roof was too low for him to stand, which is why the knees of his trousers took such heavy wear.