What is Rural?

With thanks to Lincoln Minster School, The Kings School, Grantham, and Christ’s Hospital School for coming into University today.  Here are the results of your experiment…

Overall, there were some strong areas of agreement with the Mill Pond and its wild flowers being overwhelmingly viewed as the most natural (24), the village shop being the most traditional (14), the Ribblehead viaduct considered the most isolated (14). For the other quotations, the scores were closer with the timber-frame house (9) and the windfarm (8) being most “Unwelcoming”; the Land-rover in the street being the most desirable place to live (9) and “the most rural” being the cows at the edge of the river (10).

So what do we learn from this? There is no clear agreement on what makes rural places special, attractive or unappealing. However, some common trends emerge including the fact that people would like to live in places with evidence of community rather than in more isolated rural areas where nature dominates. Also, it is interesting that a Lincolnshire audience associates cows rather than combine harvesters with “rural” – and six people found the combine harvester image to be “unwelcoming”.

Only one person considered a windfarm as “natural” – perhaps echoing the public debate windfarms being undesirable in the landscape whilst also providing a renewable source of energy. The most “natural” image of the mill-pond was created as the result of the construction of a water-mill across the River Nene which might make us think more about the ways in which we can capture energy and resources from the landscape in ways that leave a positive legacy.

Picture I’d Like to Live here This is Traditional This is What I think of when I hear “rural” This looks most natural This looks isolated This looks unwelcoming
Farmyard & Church 5 1 6 0 2 0
Mill Pond 0 0 1 24 1 0
Churchyard 0 7 1 0 2 4
Cows in river 1 0 10 4 1 0
Maypole 6 3 3 1 0 0
Wind farm 2 0 2 1 7 8
Harvesting 0 1 4 1 4 6
Timber-frame house 1 0 0 0 1 9
Viaduct 2 1 3 0 14 2
Village Shop 6 14 2 0 0 0
Land-Rover in street 9 4 0 0 0 2

Whilst there really is too little data to draw firm conclusions, I hope that the exercise opens up some important questions about how we all perceive the places around us. In particular, I hope it will encourage us to be more aware of the fact that different parts of society will attach different values on the landscape, on nature, on community assets and on cultural traditions connected to places.

 

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