I went to social media to find answers to this question – ‘If I asked you to imagine an image that sums up the word ‘Rural’ what would that look like? What would it contain?’
Below are the images and words send in response.
Facebook responses
Roy Blacker Vicar of Dibley country – Turville Buckinghamshire https://www.picturesofengland.com/…/pictures/1122335
Marc Coyles – Big old houses and barns like these at Hurstwood, near Worsthorne. Was a tiny hamlet, although I suspect these days money has landed there… https://www.google.co.uk/imgres…
(I spent much of my teenage years in the various houses at the link, and the related images. They were fabulous… big open fireplaces that 8 could stand in. Surrounded by woodland & reservoir. Head off on the various little footpaths to find some delightful wrecks, farms in the middle of nowhere, barbed wire covered in wool, odd old tin huts in the middle of the woods… was a great place to have access to growing up)
Holly Murphy A stone wall with a style in fields
Luke Dickson – Grass
Sharon Sutton Fields hedges & lanes
Johanna Tipton-Mount The middle of nowhere with a singular intriguing cottage…lots of green grass, mountains and a sheepdog resting.
just found what I was picturing in my photos…this was somewhere mostly isolated in Croatia…although I don’t know why when you asked the question I actually pictured the dales
Mary Duggan What an interesting question! My instinctive response is that it represents a managed landscape rather than a wild one. It’s a landscape that’s been shaped and nurtured by human hands. It’s also a landscape that retains a human scale. So for me, the endless cornfields of the midwestern USA don’t feel rural.
Helen Peeters Fields, stone walls, maybe a farm
Jacqui Taliesin El Masry Trees. Nature.
Jayne Pollard Drystone walls, rugged outcrops and sheep in fields
John Jowett Anywhere that doesn’t have lots of traffic and poundshops.
Suu Wernham Water, trees and the occasional building
Maddi Cassell I surprised myself with the images that first popped into my head. I grew up in a rural area, and my first responses were: big flat monoculture fields, huge machines out spraying chemicals, keep out signs and landowners with guns. It wasn’t the lovely bucolic scenes that I would have described if I had taken more time to respond
Julie Edgar Sitting waiting for the herd of cows to cross the road on their way to be milked.
Jenny Wade Rawcliffe. (Village where she was born and still lives)
Twitter responses
Irene Purcell – Trees, Green Hills, and audible stream, a barn, some sheep
Steven B Williams – The sound of sheep and birds
Iron Withell-Scythe – A fox in someone’s back garden
Karl Shore – Hedgerows
Norma Foulds – Somewhere 20 miles from nearest town, if any bus service only one a day, no shop or services , rubbish internet and mobile service , houses out if the price range of most locals, beautiful views
Liz Green – Ploughed up Fields
Crafty Owls Pottery and Arts Studio – sheep!
Emma Gee -Ladybird books with pictures of fields and 50s tractors and a church steeple in the distance – and a cow & birds
Maurice Morgan – Green areas. Trees. Wildlife. Farmlands. Accessibility for public. Quiet spaces, away from City sounds etc.
Sally Lockey – A lonely tree on Hadrian’s Wall. I think it’s because the beeb have a stock photo of it.
tony wade 
