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!

We’re described by estate agents as living in a rural hamlet .

A bus service that consists of one bus into the nearest town in the morning , and another at 4.30pm back . All the houses have an amount of land each , and the nearest house directly behind us , I cannot actually see even though the land is so flat it’s almost below sea level. Nearest school is over 5 miles away, and all the village kids get a school bus there. No mains gas , and mains drainage only went in 8 years ago. No shops , church , post office or anything else . Village hall functions as the social hub ( just got back from a bbq there ). Several farms, so get my lamb , eggs and pork directly from them . Have had a bit of infilling in recent years , so have watched a number of new houses spring up with all mod cons , heat pumps etc etc , only to watch them all have a wood burning stove installed before the following winter, because it’s also damn cold here . Everyone has a dog . Or a horse , or both . And everyone meets at the feed merchants which is the hot bed of gossip 😂

Deliverance.

Or Midsommar.

I will I know, I actually come from a small farming village in Ireland. When we were kids we had bikes to get anywhere ie 2 miles to the village.
Now I live in a nice area on very edge of London with ancient woodland and loads of green space and some farmland. But it’s being blighted by HS2, I’d rather be stranded behind a tractor, flock of sheep or even horses out hacking. But no I’m stuck behind HS2 trucks 😢

Clearly it means different things to different people.

i have 2 neighbours, behind me and in front of me it’s farmland, septic tank, oil heating…. But I’m only a mile from a town, though I suspect in England it’d be a village 😂 (Scotland) and I’m near a motorway and easy commuting distance to Edinburgh.

So I’d say I’m semi-rural.

Going by the definitions some people are saying I grew up rurally, a couple of hours drive away from things like McDonald’s, one very small supermarket, had to do a two hour ambulance ride to a big enough hospital to give birth… but I mean, I lived in a flat in a housing estate, it’s just real far away from anywhere else… so… 🤷‍♀️

We’re rural, there’s two houses next to us, one across the road and fields behind us. Nearest shop a ten minute drive. We have cows behind us. We lived in a more rural place, one farm on the road, nearest shop half an hour away, nighttime like a nightmare, pitch black everywhere!!! Love where we are now compared to there!

It varies depending on area but usually it’ll mean needing to drive to a shop, town or school. Unreliable public transport and no facilities except a pub and corner shop!

This is my version of rural.

No street lights for a couple of miles either side of my house, we live down a lane around 3/4 mile long with 5 houses total. Well water, septic tank, no fiber broadband, fruit trees in our large garden and chickens. 4 miles to nearest primary school, 4 miles in the other direction to nearest market town, which has a couple of supermarkets and such but no cinema or big chain clothing shops or anything like that. We love it though.

That’s how we live , that’s what I call rural .

Is that why you're all on Mumsnet? Because you've no people nearby?

OP your description is exactly our situation! Theres a village shop/post office/pub a mile away and a town 40 minutes. Surrounded by mountains and forests and lakes but 20 minutes to the beach.

Very similar for me. We have mountain views and, despite the village lighting, dark skies once you are right on the edge of the village which is never more than 5 mins walk for anyone. I see it as very rural but obviousy not isolated.

So "rural" = "small town" then?

Dear lord we really are in a post-truth world.

If you don't have a corner shop in walking distance and can see nature from your window is rural to me.

Tooting common then

Yes, there absolutely can be small towns within a rural community. I live in a small town that is officially considered to be a part of a rural community. But a small town in my area would be somewhere with less than 10k population, and usually under 5k. I know in some parts of the country there’s places with a population of 12-15k that are considered villages.

I'm always amazed by posters who say they live on the outskirts of a city and across from where they live are fields.

They describe this as living rurally.

I used to live rurally. It was RURAL. But people say they live rural just because there are some fields nearby, like on the outskirts of towns

To me rural is anywhere between a house/dwelling of whatever description miles from anywhere to a house in a village

The best one is someone I know who lives , according to themselves, "semi-rural". In a housing estate beside a huge shopping centre. Because if you keep walking until you're almost at a dual carriageway, there is a city farm in between the end of the next housing estate and the dual carraige way.

The first time I heard them say it I thought they were outright lying.

But I've since heard them say it WITH the name of the area, so they're not actually pretending to live in a totally different place, and believe that "semi rural" is a thing

And from what I can tell, the thing is being able to see some grass in walking distance from your house.

So all the while I thought I was living the cosmopolitan city life in a leafy part of London, I was living semi rurally???

Yes. And Alan Partridge style travel taverns are also rural. Gooold-FINGERRR

Phwoar. Can you imagine lining all of those rocks up.

Really? Google identifies it as Mont Rougemont, Canada.

Wherever it is, scenes like this are hardly scarce.

Surely no one is ... LYING ABOUT HOW RURAL THEY ARE???!!!

Really? Google identifies it as Mont Rougemont, Canada.

It's Scotland 😄

A hamlet is a collection of houses, no shop, pub, post office etc. but can have a church.