In defence of rural life

What is the culture of the countryside? What does it consist of, if it exists at all?

We could all, perhaps, offer a rather bland and romantic definition which would involve all things green and leafy. Yet, undeniably, a dominant perception of the distinction between town and country is one predicated on an absence of that amorphous beast—"culture"—within the rural.

This issue has recently been flagged up by an initiative from the department of culture, media and sport, announcing that from 2013, Britain will have its own city of culture each year. However, speaking on the Today programme, Andy Woodward, chief executive of Farm Stay UK, which represents working farms, pointed out an important bias in this entire approach to the labelling and championing of culture. He argued that we should instead consider the countryside itself as a "city" of culture—of sorts.

No doubt there is much cultural activity within the more rural parts of the country. Britain is awash with stately homes for one thing. But more interesting is the challenge Woodward's proposal presents to how we attach "culture" to the physical and organised environment. It's easy to point to a museum and say "culture," much trickier to do this standing in a field.

One way this has been done in the past has been to create national parks, with fences and neatly landscaped pathways through wooded areas. But surely the danger, if such a proposal is accepted, would be in creating a Disneyland of the countryside. By increasingly packaging up the rural as part of a tourism drive and making it more "accessible," might we not run the risk of destroying an already valued, but less hard to define, rural culture?