ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the pre-modern and post-modern simultaneous longings for, and worries about, rural spaces. In particular it was the dominant discourses of the English countryside and the heterogeneity of rural populations and rural experiences and performed some key cultural labour in terms of national identity that became problematised in the new research approaches to understanding rurality. It is worth spending a moment detailing the right to roam protests mainly because they historicise the struggles over entitlement and access to rural spaces and evidence the contentions over rural identities and belonging but also because their resolution was an victory for the rural access movement but also worked was a reinforcement of the relationship between Englishness and rural spaces. The chapter suggests the concept of otherness, transfers to rural spaces because these require 'outcast' populations to define and add content or meanings to them, but also because rural spaces are themselves imprinted with the histories of colonialism.
