Whilst in Philadelphia in June I took a day’s holiday at the end of my trip and used it as an opportunity to visit the Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There was only one way to do this from Philadelphia without a car, and I was worried it would be a zoo-like experience. I don’t think it was the most authentic of days, but I did get to meet and talk to some local Amish people and it was a fascinating experience.

There are clearly things about the lifestyle that strike you as appealing, the centrality of family and home, an existence governed by the seasons, and, most of all, its simplicity. But there are just as many things that are anathema to all my most firmly held beliefs – for a start the importance of equality for women and education, which are non-negotiables as far as I’m concerned.

The juxtaposition between the banning of electricity, the pony traps and the traditional dress on the one side, and the electronic card reader in the quilt shop, the children’s inflatable swimming pool in the back yard and a house with water-powered kitchen appliances on the other, took me right back to studying cultural geography at University. It made me realise that the reality of the Amish way of life is far more complicated than our image of it.

I therefore got straight onto my kindle to find the best books that sensitively examined these issues and I found the fantastic The Riddle of Amish Culture by Donald Kraybill. It’s such an engaging, well researched and written book. It tackles head on all the questions that you have as an outsider looking in, showing how culture has evolved and how its integrity has been preserved precisely by adopting modernity, as long as it is not in direct threat to core Amish beliefs.

My confession is that I then fancied a bit of Amish fiction, and discovered by searching around a whole new (and very weird looking) sub-genre of Christian fiction. Clearly I wasn’t going there, so I tried instead Plain Truth by Judi Picoult. I’ve never read this kind of beach holiday romantic fiction as it’s also really not my thing, but I have to say I enjoyed this fictionalised version of the life I’d just been learning about.

All I can say is that if you’re ever in Pennsylvania, take a visit to the town of Bird-in-Hand and spend some tourist dollars on a beautiful quilt – you won’t regret the experience.