In a rural setting, public spaces lie between households. These are spaces shared with neighbours. And as you walk out of the village centre, either up the hill, into the fields or down to the riverbank or the coast, Nature’s presence begins to dominate and you are then but a guest in a wider world as yet little touched by persistent human interference.
Where tar roads connect village to village to town to city allowing for hasty vehicles to zoom along at breakneck speeds, distance both appears and disappears at the same time. It disappears because you can now travel quickly to places that were once far away. Space shrinks. But in shrinking, it also appears in our consciousness as something to be traversed, something that is merely in the way, as it were, of your wish to get from A to B. Space becomes a bother.
