When people say they live “rural”, what do you envision?

[popbingo]

So many posters on MN talk about living rurally. I picture a farmhouse (or something similar) in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields and mountains. The nearest shop would be a 30 minute drive away etc.

Please share your thoughts!

I live rurally. Where I live these are things that make it rural . . .

No pavements, my noisy neighbours are sheep (ATM, but sometimes cattle and occasionally campers), no lights visible as I look down the valley so it’s pitch black at night. A pub 2 fields away, another half a mile in the other direction! No shops within several miles, more than a 10 minute drive to a town. I know the postie by name and she leaves parcels even when we’re not home. No mobile signal in the house.

One thing that had surprised me is the description of villages I have seen on Mumsnet. I'm in Ireland and live a mile from our nearest village. We have a primary school, pub and church but our shop and post office closed in recent years.
I remember a thread on here where people said they lived in a village but went on to describe having a supermarket, hairdresser and lots of other things. That sound more like my local town.

I think I imagine roads with no street lighting or markings, but with ridiculous speed limits.
No access to shops or they close early, few neighbours, nothing much to do/see…
Needing to drive everywhere- no conveniences such as fast delivery services for groceries (where I am can get pretty much most things delivered within half an hour), getting stuck at home in bad weather, no traffic noise, lots of wildlife I guess?
Everybody dresses the same…
Would be perfect to have a dog?

I feel like I 'live in a rural area' even though I actually live in a small town with several pubs, 2 shops, cafe, hairdressers, school etc.
But I can be on a mountain by foot in 2 miles and then wonder for 10 without seeing another person. The nearest motorway is 1.5 hrs. Very small city half an hour away but 2 hours from here to the next.
When I go south, I see lots of lovely rural properties but they seem to be much closer to modern civilisation. For example you can't even get a taxi in my town, no way a deliveroo or anything like that.
Obviously many people around here live proper rural including our parents and inlaws etc, so everyone around here tends to do quite a bit of driving.

Nearest house about 500m away – near enough to hear me if I break a leg in the fields* far enough way to not disturb or be disturbed.

*have never tested this theory.

Yep, Quantock Hills for me too!

I live in a village of 300 old people, but with a small shop and Post Office and a pub. 8 miles to the nearest town. One bus every two hours during the week, stops at 5. Do I count as rural?

I’m semi-rural. Barn owl in the tree out back, deer in the garden etc. On the west side of the Malvern Hills - hills behind, Herefordshire laid out for miles in front, unbroken view to Wales and miles and miles of countryside as far as the eye can see. Village shop/cafe and one pub… but over the hills is the town and the conurbation. Best of both worlds.

Still I’d live to be rural rural with no neighbours and no noise other than wildlife.

For me it's about lack of public transport and shops. The school buses stop in our village but the nearest proper bus stop is two miles away (buses once an hour but only until 6pm). The nearest shop of any kind (and the nearest pub) is five miles away. We have neighbours in a traditional small farming village - four proper farms and three streets of mid sized and smallish detached and semi detached houses, with fields and forests around until the similar sized village where the bus stop is.

So not half an hour's drive to a shop, but also not a big village with a shop/ pub/ school.

Rural to me is barely able to see a neighbour and a 15 minute drive to the nearest village shop. Where your postcode is basically useless because it covers so many square miles that you need a grid reference or what 3 words to actually find your address.

no streetlights and pavements and busses every 2 hours is my village and I wouldn’t call it rural.

Where I grew up.

Thatched house at the end of a half mile single track drive. Late for school sometimes if the cows were crossing the drive from one field to another. Garden of fields and woodland with a River at the bottom.

No neighbors, at least ten minutes drive to closest village

I live rurally, we are in a farmhouse with no close neighbours.
We are down a track and are not visible from country lane.
The nearest village is a couple of miles away.

I do not consider living in a village as rural living.

Hamlet of 25 dwellings consisting of houses, cottages and farms along one road surrounded by farmland, nearest pub, church and bus stop a mile away, 15 min drive to town with supermarket and amenities.

I once saw this online.

If you stand naked on the front porch and the neighbours can't see you, it's rural. If you stand naked on the front porch and the neighbours call the cops, it's suburban. If you stand naked on the front porch and the neighbours ignore you, it's urban.

My mum says i live "out in the sticks". When we first lived here i thought we were rural but the nearest town 1.5 miles away is getting closer with the new houses that keep being built. We are now 20 minutes walk from McDonalds and a pub. Would be quicker but the road is a nightmare to cross.

There was a thread about this really recently. Some people thought rural meant the same as remote, but it doesn't. The fact that the dictionary definition is basically just 'in the countryside' didn't seem to persuade them, for some reason. So, village or even a small town can be rural, even if it's not absolutely miles away from a city.

Farm track, septic tank, oil heating or LPG, snow tyres, one or two neighbours, a few miles to nearest shop or pub, big supermarkets at least 25 mins drive, McDonalds/cinema an hour away. Shit/non-existent phone reception.

I’m not rural any more, but I used to be.

I’m really curious to know what sort of work people who live in some of these truly rural areas do for a living? (And whether I can do the same?!)

I’d say a good 50% of problems posted on here end up being because “we live rurally”. I see it every day.

I would describe my last house in the U.K. as being in a rural area.
It was a small village, surrounded on all sides by arable farmland (sugar beet crop mostly!), a huge poultry farm on the back end and a pig farm where the main road enters the village. We had a village primary school, a small shop and a post office, one road in and out, and we were about 10 miles from the nearest big town.
We had enough essential amenities to manage, but were also close enough to town for it not to feel like a huge mission to get there…..and the constant smell of sugar beet processing and pig shit just added to the rural ambience 🫠🫠😂😂🤷🏻‍♀️

Either that or living in a village surrounded by fields or forest. That IS rural… what you’re thinking of is isolated. Rural means ‘in, relating to, or characteristic of the countryside rather than the town’ therefore a village in the countryside is rural.

I think rural can mean anything from a lone farmhouse to a small but somewhat cutoff village.

This is interesting! I say I grew up rurally, but that was in a village of about 700 people (more like 1000 now) with a shop, pub, school and village hall. Not especially remote, so I wonder if I'm over selling it? Nearest town 5 miles away: about 4 buses a day. Nearest A&E at least 25 minutes away. My secondary school catchment was about a 10 mile radius though (grammar school) and even the comps were about a 5 mile radius.

I do remember uni friends coming to visit and being shocked that there were just fields around the village itself: miles of farmland between settlements.

Growing up my godmother moved to a house 1.5 miles from the nearest village on the North Yorkshire moors- so that!

snowed in in winter, breathtaking in Summer- everything miles away

I went back to the village 15+ years ago and DD2 fell (was being a sod) in a stream soaking the cast on her broken wrist - 1hr and 20 mins to hospital in the dark to get it fixed - then back again

I love rural life as a holiday but not for me full time

So interesting. And totally agree with the standing naked on your front porch test!

So, those of you who enjoy living like this: what do you think of people like me who panic at the thought of living more than a 10 minute walk away from a tube station ? Do I not know what I’m missing out on? I see the beautiful views but I actually would get palpitations at the thought of being so far from an A&E, relying on a septic tank, dying a lonely death if something incapacitated me, being isolated for weather-related reasons etc. Don’t you need people around you?