ABSTRACT
The terms ‘rural’ and ‘countryside’ tend to evoke images of harmony and consensus. In Britain such images derive much of their power from the proximity of the countryside ideal to British national identity, and it has always seemed to enshrine those timeless qualities that make this ‘sceptred isle’ forever ‘England’. Rural land is considered a priceless part of the nation’s heritage. It has traditionally been a ‘cosy corner’ in which an ‘Anglocentric’ culture, one opposed to the multiculturalism increasingly evident in many cities, could nestle down safe from harm (Lowe et al. 1995). A not dissimilar view of the countryside has often been (unwittingly) rehearsed in academic writing on rural Britain. Thus academic texts have frequently portrayed the rural as a homogeneous social space, one which seems in many ways to exist in some timeless zone where old-fashioned virtues and their associated forms of life still linger. And while in the past thirty years or so a more critical approach to the countryside has been evident, as recent debates, to be discussed below, have shown, even these accounts have sometimes thrown up new versions of the same old rural myths.
