In, of, or suggesting, the country. Bell (2007) J. Rural Studs 23, 4 distinguishes between ‘first rural’ (basically, low population density), and ‘second rural’—a rural of associations. ‘It calls upon the connections we have long made between rural life and food, cultivation, community, nature, wild freedom, and masculine patriarchal power, and the many contradictions we have also so long associated with the rural, such as desolation, isolation, dirt and disease, wild danger, and the straw-hatted rube.’ Halfacree (1995) J. Rural Studs 11, 1 makes the case for defining ‘the rural’ as ‘an abstract social representation; a set of rules and resources existing out of space and time which are drawn upon in both discursive and non-discursive actions. The precise form that this representation takes in these actions is highly contextualised and depends upon its precise usage’. Rurality, through its strong cultural entanglement with ‘nature’, is seen as a repository of more embedded and authentic values (see R. Mabey 2005). McCarthy (2006) PHG 29, 6 argues that ‘rurality’ ‘remains at least as much a product of divisions of labor within the academy and social contexts as a category defined by particular sectoral mixes, land uses, densities, or other empirical descriptors’. M. Woods (2005) concludes that ‘it seems that the real power in the British countryside is the very idea of rurality itself’.

Halfacree in P. Cloke et al., eds (2006) notes that productivist agriculture was to be the essence of ‘modern’ rurality. Tonts and Grieve (2002) Australian Geog. Studs 40 examine the destructive tendencies associated with the commodification of rurality in some of Australia’s more scenic and accessible rural areas. See Bell (2000) Rural Sociol. 65, 4 and Little (2002) PHG 26, 5 on rurality and sexuality.