“…Mingay's (1989) edited volume, The Rural Idyll, opened wide this line of thought, which had been presaged by Williams's 1973 identification of the ''golden echo'' of rural life. A number of studies subsequently investigated what might be termed the ''idyllology'' of the rural (Bell, 1992(Bell, , 1994Cloke and Little, 1997;Halfacree, 1995;Little and Austin, 1996;Valentine, 1997), and articles in recent issues of Journal of Rural Studies continue to interrogate what it excludes and avoids (Blackstock et al, 2006;Neal and Walters, 2006;Rye, 2006;Winchester and Rofe, 2005).…”