What does “rural” mean to you?

[HowDairy]

We see it very often on MN - “I live rurally”.
So what do you consider is rural?
Just how far out of town is proper rural living?

To me, it means that you have to drive for the essentials - milk, bread etc.
But then, “ walkable” means different things to each and every one of us, dependent on ability.
So, answering my own question, it’s basically a how long is a piece of string scenario 🤔

I live in a rural town. Right on the edge, so in the countryside next to the ridgeway. There is only one secondary school nearby, the next nearest is a half hour drive, outside of a delivery zone for a takeaway, a mile and a half from a shop, and a 20 minute drive to a train station. I can hear sheep from my bedroom window. It’s absolutely rural, less than 10k population. It doesn’t meet some of these definitions, but if you live here, or moved here from a city, it’s definitely rural.

I agree. Away from shops and village and pub. Drive everywhere. No starched neighbours.

I say I’m rural and usually add out in the sticks if asked how rural! No mains gas (we have oil), no mains sewage (we have Klargester sewage system), no street lights, no village shop, no village post office…a pub and a church, that’s it! No buses run through the village and no pavements! Closest big village with small supermarket and post office etc is about 15mins drive, main line train station to city is prob about half hour drive. House surrounded by woods, pitch black outside at night as no light pollution and nothing but wildlife noises! Wouldn’t change it for the world..

We live rurally - a small village where fields are in between/behind many of the houses. No mains sewerage for many properties and no mains surface drainage or gas at all in the village. Lots of farmland generally and agriculture is a large part/the main part of the local economy. Roads are narrow and poorly maintained, no pavement and only occasional streetlights.

But we're a couple of miles or so from the edge of a small market town (much of the business there is linked to agriculture) and a major road. So while we're in a rural area, we aren't remote. From reading this thread it seems a lot of people feel that rural and remote need to mean the same thing, but I'm not sure they do.

I’m fairly rural based. No pavements, no street lights, no shops or amenities, no public transport. But 5 minutes drive to a village with all of the above. 15 minutes to a market town, 40 minutes to large town/cities. However my home isn’t tucked away down a hidden lane so debatable. My townie friends think it’s the back of beyond though.

😀

Some people on here seem to think that anything outwith the city walls is rural. Other people think you have to live five miles from your nearest neighbour.

I think if you live in an area where the largest industry is agriculture, you can walk out of your front door and be in the countryside within a few hundred yards, and the local farm shop is on an actual farm, then the chances are you are fairly rural.

As the crow flies, 27 minutes from any sort of Tesco.

Similar, 2 shops (1 was the post office but that went 2-3 years ago), 2 pubs, 2 buses a day. Surrounded by farms, mainly dairy and fruit. A 10 minute drive to the motorway and towns about 20 minutes away in all directions. It’s rural because it’s not urban but it’s not isolated.

@HowDairyyes, definitely had an impact on my choice of where to live as an adult. Apart from a tractor, I never learnt to drive and the whole stress of water running out frequently amongst other things means I will only ever live in a city

Rural means living in an area where it is in the countryside, fields and a lower population. This is what most villages would fall under and not having any shop or amenities in walking distance. I grew up in a village with fields behind my house, across the road, it had a farm in the village, horses ridden regularly and the nearest city was nearly an hour away. We had a village shop/post office, pub, primary school, a garage/petrol station and a chip shop. It was still very rural though and you had to drive to the nearest town going past fields. Your idea is remote to have no shop for essentials unless the village hasn't got a shop. Villages are rural and can have a few shops, school, garage and pub.

My neighbour's house is currently for sale and I was intrigued to see the estate agent had described it as semi rural. We're in a village with a population of less than 1000 surrounded by fields. There's no mains gas, mains sewage or pavements. The village does have a pub, a church and a school but they're scattered around, at least 1.5 miles between each other and there's no village centre as such. There's no shops of any description for about 5 miles and it's 10miles to the nearest small town with a supermarket There's no public transport, none of the houses have numbers and most of the roads don't have names. I'd call that rural myself. I'm not sure what's "semi" about it.
The only thing I can think is that it's all relative. If you live in the middle of a big city then a suburb probably seems rural. Not far from us there are really isolated hamlets and single houses so I suppose the fact that I do actually have neighbours, the roads are tarmac and there's an A road through the village makes it quite a developed place in comparison. There's even a street light at the end of our road and there's a mobile signal most of the time. Practically urban really I suppose.

REMOTE would be in isolated rural areas.

RURAL would be in the countryside for me, drive to village.

REGIONAL would be smaller hamlets, villages and market towns.

URBAN would be outer cities, not always walkable to shops.

CITY would mean walkable to most things including rail/bus in a city.

Lots of these posters would accuse old mining and farming communities in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Herefordshire, for example, of being non-rural.
The basic lack of knowledge never fails to astound me!

It seems there is rural and then there is rural 🤔

I wouldn't have thought of a village with 1000 residents that spans more than 1.5 miles as rural. But having no mains gas etc. suggests that it is miles away from larger villages that have mains services.

Our postcode includes 8 houses, none of which are a short walk away.
When it snows, none of us can get out unless we use our tractors. It doesn't even have to be a great amount, it is the wind causing drifts that are the problem.
If the electric is cut off, so is our water as it is pumped up from the spring.
The beast from the east left us cut off from the electric (and water) and unable to get out for 5 days. The phones for the electricity board were so busy we couldn't get through to tell them out electric was still off, they thought it was on.
We had to get our neighbour, who lives closer to the road to us to flag down a worker to tell them.
Our electric was the last to come back on as we are the end of the overhead wires and there was a fault there.
That was a brutal week!!

You know you are rural hen gunfire is either from a military training area of a farmers shotgun, rather than be worried there's a gunfight somewhere

I think this ‘no shops’ thing is really sad. A few of the villages in my neck of the woods have small community run shops that sell the essentials. Years ago that would have been normal in ‘rural’ villages or hamlets. I’m not sure the lack of a shop changes the geography and size of the settlement you live in. It just makes it more inconvenient! I agree that a lot of people here are confusing rural with remote or isolated.

I think people think of it differently depending on whether you live outside of a built up area or not.

To me, rural places do have a shop or pub or school for precisely the reason that they are miles from anywhere else.

If you live just outside Manchester then your rural definition probably means more isolated. Where as beyond Aberdeen and Inverness, most of north Scotland has very little in it of any size and a very large land mass. So things that would count as more suburban here are probably still more closely tied to the rural economy than villages just beyond bigger centres of population.

we live in a hamlet of abt 80 houses near a railway station - in fact here because of it, and a canal. Bus you have to phone up, school next bit of village - primary abt 2.9 miles and roads all single small two way so school bus, nearest corner shop another small village about 1.5 miles so walkable via canal at a pinch same for pub, original houses in area were farm cottages, surrounded by farm fields. Motorway within 10 minutes driving tho, airport 20m, major city 20m, nearest market town 8m. Its lovely but under threat of development currently (min 8.5k houses) which would surround us. And the noise of the motor way is excessive these days - a) vol of traffic b) hrs its busy - from 4.30am basically c) speed people travel and d) heavier cars inc noise generated. I miss the quiet of lockdown that was bliss

oh yeah and hear tractors frequently, clippy cloppy horses daily several times, and a steamer comes through the train station occasionally as well - love listening to the sounds hate the motorway background. We get train noise too just not as intrusive of constant as the mway. I know it was here before we moved but the inc in noise is significant since we moved here 16 yrs ago

Sounds like where I grew up and I'd class that as rural.

Where I live has been described as "too remote" and "...in the a* end of nowhere", so perhaps that counts, in most people's books! If I show them where I live on Google Maps, they're usually horrified because it is just green hedges and hills for miles!

I live on a tiny lane with a few houses. We're not on mains gas and have septic tanks. We are surrounded by farms, and our noisiest nights of the year only occur when the lambs are being weaned in the next fields! It would be hard to live here if we didn't drive. Buses are supposed to be every 2 hours (but don't always turn up), the nearest town has two single-car taxi ranks, and the nearest train station is 15 miles away. The nearest small Co-Op is 4 miles away, but any useful shops (like B&Q or clothes shops) require a 15-20 mile drive. Saying that, though, we always breathe a sigh of relief on the way home from such trips, when the world suddenly turns green and is full of sheep and tractors again!

"Remote" always reminds me of the moors near where I grew up, where you can't see another farm for miles!

To me it means not in a city or town. But possibly a village.

I live in a village that most people would consider very rural. From my window I look out on farms. But there is a shop, and I can walk to get essentials, and my kids can walk to the primary school (which these days many town kids cannot,) and there is even a very small cafe. A lot of the people who live here are farmers or work in the lumber industry.

Rural areas in general used to be much more self-sufficient, the car has been a mixed blessing to many villages.

No one I know says that they live rurally.