ABSTRACT
Rural land is regarded as important for a number of reasons. It represents the space and resource base for timber and food production, and so becomes an essential component in the political discourse over the strategic need for agricultural self-sufficiency, and over the economic necessity in the case of some nations to reproduce an export capacity in agricultural produce under rapidly changing trade conditions. It also comprises a major spatial constituency for outdoor recreation and is therefore subject to the necessary discussions about access, facility-provision and management which accompany both multiple land use and specific recreational schemes on rural land. Recreation is in turn predicated on landscape quality (at various scales) and often also on the factor of heritage which is attributed to the rural environment, again both in part and as a whole. Recognition of the value of landscape in its heritage context and in ecological terms has given rise to an expanding interest in the conservation of rural land and landscape, whereby an attempt is made to express a format of common interest in maintaining particularly threatened or precious elements. Conservation has become important, not only in deep rural areas but also on the urban fringe. Paradoxically in these areas of conflict over the transfer of rural land to urban use, often for housing development, the influx of adventitious rural residents gives a boost to the conservation cause, which has been characterized (somewhat cruelly) as groups of people wanting to ensure that they are the last to be permitted to move into – and thereby spoil – these rural environments.
