Another big difference living in the country... Abandoned houses can be seen everywhere. Generally farm houses & especially barns, and regular family houses. They are all in varying stages of decay ranging from several years to decades. Structures frozen in time slowly being reclaimed by nature. Wood structures will take 200 years to fall to the ground and succumb to termites in undergrowth. So they are all going to be around for quite some time. Remnants from stone structures will last centuries... stone factories & millworks, stone walls, and stone bridges.
Why? I guess there's so much open land here that there's little need to tear down the old to build the new. But the underlying question is why some one simply walked away from houses, never to be lived in again, left to decay. They died? They moved away? And why didn't it sell to others? Perhaps these houses were lived in, and after years and decades of neglected maintenance, it simply became so run down that it couldn't be saved. So I guess I somewhat understand why this could happen.
What I can't imagine is the homes... the massive estates that are historically majestic simply abandoned! No one would want them? No one would sell them?
Seems so strange.
