Downsides of rural living?

[Staffielove23]

Another thread in AIBU got me thinking about the downsides of rural living. Dependence of a car, farm smells and traffic.. anyone else?

I loathed rural living!

No gas supply so no proper central heating.
Much colder in the countryside.
Needing a chest freezer in case of getting cut off and because supermarkets are so far away.
No supermarket delivery.
No other deliveries.
Needing a big 4wd car all year for the few days it snows and the roads don't get cleared.
Long commute.
No public transport so all over 17s needing their own car.
Long journeys to school.
Tiny schools with only a few potential friends.
No privacy
Bigger spiders
Field mice coming inside
No pavements
No street lights
So far from leisure activities eg cinema, swimming pool, bowling, trampolining.
More likely to be conservative voting.
Villagers all related to each other.
Lack of diverse jobs.
Lack of starter flats for young people.
Far from airports to go on holiday.
Can't see friends without overnight stays.
No choice of schools
Dangerous windy country roads.
Higher petrol prices
Higher prices in local shops

Only negative to me is having to plan journeys to our petrol in the car (I hate doing a journey just to do that). But it's just being organised and now I have a hybrid it is easier!

Mud and dogs. Everyone has a bloody dog. Everyone keeps asking why I don’t have a bloody dog. I don’t want a bloody dog. I am reliant on my cat.

But seriously, you can’t generalise. There’s rural and rural. I’m rural, but in a village within a National Park. We have a lot of the facilities that are mentioned on this thread as lacking - chemist, doctor’s surgery, post office, pub, shop, lovely primary school. We can walk to all of them, on pavements. There’s plenty going on socially, it’s certainly not lonely.

The mud though. Oh my god.

My dream home is the one from The Snowman I live a ten minute walk from there (through mud) ☺️

No public transport
Low employment
Poor phone signal
Lack of highway maintenance
Every weekend it's like the Tour De France around the lanes
Oh and the suicidal deer.

I'm not sure there will BE any rural areas in ten or twenty years. I live in rural Essex, and in the last decade or so I have watched village after village ruined by new build housing estates. The sleepy village where my grandparents lived is more like a small town now. As a child in the 1980s, it was idyllic – a little old village shop, quiet lanes, blackberry picking, etc. Today, those lanes cope with the traffic of a motorway. Instead of birdsong, all you hear is the screaming of car engines and modified exhausts (which sound like fireworks going off).

I'm in a village. At the other end, they are building so many houses it's staggering. God knows what the traffic will be like when those houses are all sold. It's unbearable NOW. I sometimes think the UK, and especially England, will end up as a single, giant housing estate. I'd have more peace and quiet in the outskirts of London.

I have never lived rurally for these reasons.

Utter dependence on car
Lack of jobs
Low income jobs
Lack of choice for evenings out
Lack of culture
Lack of diversity
Lack of pavements
Everyone knowing everyone's business, judging and living in each other's pockets
The loneliness
The boredom
The mud
Long walks alone in the countryside scare the living daylights out of me

My inlaws live in the middle of nowhere and every weekend of the summer you can hear chainsaws from tree management in local woods which drives you crazy. That and the wood pigeons.

Well, it would help if Essex folk would stop having unprotected sex. This, plus UTC is driving up the need for long term housing.

I've lived in most types of places and would say there are pros and cons everywhere. There are very few amenities living rurally and everything is a long drive away. I now live with my DS(9) in a capital city and am still amazed at what activities he can do after school during the week. Two of them are quite niche and if he wanted to do it in Somerset, where we used to live, it would be a 90 minute drive to Bristol or Exeter. Not feasible after school as a weekly activity. When I took DS to London for half term, he was reading bus timetables and working out the underground and loving getting us from A to B. No chance of any kind of independence living rurally really.

It takes time and effort to become part of a small rural community. It isn't for the faint hearted.

That's one of my favourite bits!

We didn't have a car growing up so going anywhere was almost impossible. Getting the bus to Bristol was like going to the moon. Last bus back was around 6pm also.
It was a fairly idyllic place to be a child but now everyone commutes into the city and there's a big out of town Tesco so all of the little village shops, and most of the pubs have gone.
Everyone having cars has changed a lot. The bus service has almost vanished.

Disclaimer: I’ve never lived rural.

Ive never wanted to. I like being in the hustle and bustle of a city, close to anything I could possibly want or need, reliable and frequent public transport, reliable deliveries…so the opposite of those are what I imagine rural living to be like.

It was annoying enough as a teen to have to walk for half an hour to get a bus then the tube to London - couldn’t imagine anything longer or having to rely on mum and dad to ferry me about.

Rural Nottinghamshire here. Car dependency is a big one, through lack of public transport. The earliest bus to our town where I work gets into town at 9.20am. No good when I start work at 8!

Nearest train station is half hour drive away (I used to live in a town where I could walk to the train station, get a train to the city and have a few day session drinks. Can't do that here , I can't even get to the train station without my car ) .
Lack of activities and local jobs.
Our village is very easily isolated in any snow.
No takeaways deliver here. Deliveroo is not here yet.
Not even Iceland supermarket deliver here.
Difficult to access facilities. No local swimming pools , gyms , dentists , nothing like cinemas or bowling.

One crap hairdresser (that might be unfair, they do their hair dressing for what seems like the older population of the village and struggles to deviate from perms !).
Uber isn't a thing here. To book a taxi you need to give about 6 months notice !
Pub opens at 5 , closes at 10. No nightlife, no cafes.
No diversity.
Mucky, pot hole ridden , poorly maintained roads.
And our local area has one of the highest council tax rates in the country.

I think it just depends what your priorities are what you enjoy doing in your spare time and probably also your age. I absolutely hate cities, I’ve lived rurally all my life and I’d never move but I know friends who’ve been to our house can’t understand why we choose to live here. Things they have said they couldn’t deal with are the dark and quiet- they found it scary, no takeaway delivery, can’t walk to get a coffee or to the shops, bad roads. It’s each to their own isn’t it 🤷‍♀️ I don’t understand how they can bear to live in a city or even a town and they don’t understand why I live here! The only thing I can possibly think of as a downside and especially for older people is we are a good hour away from a hospital which obviously isn’t ideal

If anything goes wrong in your life, you won't be able to use any advice about how to improve matters because you live 'very rurally'.

Power cuts and total absence of public transport for me! I still feel the upsides make up for the downsides for me personally, though.

@Bagofweasels it's funny you mention the quiet and dark - we recently moved from one area of the city to another, we're now in a housing estate whereas before we were just off a main road. It's SO much quieter that I can now really appreciate how bad my tinnitus is! (It's not darker though, still a streetlamp outside our bedroom!)

Mud!
No phone signal.
When the car breaks and you have to walk back from the garage 🙄
Lack of amenities

Do the cats pull you along in chariots?

Knowing cats I would be the one pulling them along in a chariot 🤣

I lived in a rural community, my mother didn’t drive so we used to think nothing of walking a few villages along to find a shop or a bank.

I moved when I met my DH, he lived 300 miles away in a large town and when we had the discussion, he couldn’t see himself living somewhere so rural, where as I was desperate for civilisation and to be out of small town mentality.

Would I go back? Not until I retire. I enjoyed growing up somewhere rural as you do make your own fun but limited facilities including nhs services & lack of local jobs make it hard as a young adult.

We are very rural Scotland. I don’t see any downsides where we live. I have a teen and he’s not bothered about being driven everywhere as same for all his friends.
School bus comes to the top of the drive.
Even our tiny one track road gets ploughed by snow plough.
We drive and that’s a necessity but fine with that.

Prior to this house we lived in a town centre. We could walk everywhere but so many people and so much noise. We have Cptsd, adhd and autism between us so quiet is everything

General inconvenience - having to plan all food in advance as it's a long round trip if you run out of bread, very little public transport, having to drive to everything and therefore any errand taking up more of your day. Boring for kids in the holidays. Makes it harder for teens to become independent. We moved back to a town, wouldn't live rurally again.