Europe I would think, especially the more rugged areas, would certainly fair better long term against mauraders, etc than almost anywhere else I can think of, mainly due to the centries long history of warfare and construction of defences. Elsewhere in the world such as the US and of course here in Australia, ancient village walls, castles etc are in extremely short supply.
Short term however, Europe is bound to have suffered some pretty extreme population shifts early on. The village you've refered to I think would have a chance of staying in one peice however, as you've mentioned, it would take time to prepare, time probably wasted in the first few days, possibly even weeks while the inhabitants realised exactly what's about to come down on them.
I believe that before the first nukes in Europe, the vast majority of refugees would be from those areas the fighting was actually taking place in - predominately Poland. Where these people go is anyone's guess but I'd think the German speaking Poles would head west, those in southern Poland are likely to go into the mountains and Czecholslovakia, and in the east, the majority might be fleeing before the advancing Nato armies - just conjecture though....
Once nukes began to be used, and targets outside of the immediate areas fighting was taking place, almost everyone with even the slightest fear of a bomb dropping nearby would be looking for somewhere else to be.
With that in mind, I think there'd be little reason for any but the most paranoid of villages and towns to prepare defences before late 1997. I'm guessing that even though the Soviets threw the first tactical nuke on the 9th of July 1997 at the Chinese, real panic in the west wouldn't set in until after the Siege of Warsaw was lifted and deep strategic strikes began in October 1997.
With the effects of EMP hitting civilian transportation hard, everyone would be looking for anything capable of moving to transport them - horses probably being prized above all else (had to get the thread back on track somehow
). Then, a month or so later when the horseborne had found relative safety and food shortages really started to bite (and winter had well and truely set in) those horses would begin to look like very tempting food sources.
So, by the time the various militaries seriously began considering horses and cavalry, most would have died from the direct effects of the bombs, disease, starvation, exposure (winter 97-98 was harsh), radiation and of course hungry people. Whatever animals made it through that first dread winter would have to be few and far between.