Rural living isn’t as healthy as you think – here’s what it’s really like

In the classic fable of the country mouse and the town mouse, the moral was clear; a country life is simpler and better for you.

In the 21st century, however, I’m not so sure. For the past three years I have been splitting my week between a flat in Zone 2 London and a cottage in a remote Devon valley.

That I breathe a sigh of relief the moment I step off the train in Devon is true. But I’ve come to realise something quite frustrating. I actually feel physically healthier in the city.

Particularly at this time of year.

When it’s dark at 6pm in the countryside, there’s nothing to do with your evening but hunker down. In the city, it never gets dark. You can pound pavements at 2am if you really want to.

I can tot up 18,000 steps in a day in London – once I’ve walked to work and back, run errands and seen friends. There have been days in Devon when I haven’t hit a thousand.

Health isn’t just exercise though. How does living in the countryside – home to 17 per cent of the population – compare with city dwelling when it comes to diet, air quality and mental health?

When I am travelling to London, yoga teacher Antonia Reed-Felstead is on her way back to her parents’ home in rural Wiltshire. Like me, she’s settled into a rhythm that alternates between city and countryside.

“While I adore my country life, it’s not the perfect healthy idyll it feels like it should be,” she admits.

Her mental health has improved substantially, she says: “But the winters are long and dark. It takes a lot more effort to arrange things with friends. You can easily end up isolating yourself, which isn’t ideal and, in turn, certainly doesn’t help mental health. It is what puts me off moving fully out of London for now.”

It is a paradox that Andy Jones, a professor of public health at the University of Hertfordshire, encounters in his research into the health differences between rural and urban populations.

“People have a vision that it’s super healthy to live in a rural area. But it’s much more nuanced than that,” he says.

So what are the key health areas where rural life is more of a struggle than you’d think?

Physical activity

This came as a shock to me. Basically, unless you have a dog, it’s unlikely that you will do much walking in the countryside. It’s often just too dark, wet and muddy. There isn’t the variety of places to walk (if you are sticking to footpaths) or the reason or time to, particularly during a working day.

“You might think the countryside is an amazing place to be physically active, but most people’s physical activity is to get to places, rather than for recreational purposes,” says Prof Jones. “And if places are too far away, people won’t walk or cycle to them, they get in the car.”

Indeed, according to UK Household Longitudinal Study research, urban residents were 64 per cent more likely than rural residents to engage frequently in active travel.

In London, Reed-Felstead walks or cycles to every class she teaches. In the countryside, she teaches mostly online.

“Luckily for me I am a little obsessed with steps and nature, so I will happily go out for two or three hours for a walk. But without making that deliberate decision, you can easily end up being extremely sedentary.”

Nowadays, Reed-Felstead will go outside before teaching for the same time it would take her to get to that class if she was in London. Her discipline is enviable. But are steps a good guide to health? According to Barbara Jefferis, an associate professor of epidemiology who leads the UCL Physical Activity Research Group, there is increasing evidence of an association between the number of steps per day and the onset of important health outcomes, with heart disease and all causes of mortality studied.

So a person with an average of 10,000 steps a day will have much lower risk of both heart disease and mortality than those averaging 3,000 steps a day.

In 2021, car journeys accounted for 75 per cent of all trips for those in rural areas. By comparison, 51 per cent of trips by residents of urban conurbations were made by car.

When your nearest shop is five miles away, you are unlikely to take on the walk. Hence the step count drops dramatically.

Recreational activity

It makes sense that if you are surrounded by beautiful countryside, then you would want to walk in it. Indeed, the number of people who go out for a walk to enjoy it is higher in rural areas, says Prof Jones: “But recreational activities for most people is a small proportion of their overall activity. So it doesn’t compensate.”

It is also not as straightforward as you might think to go for a run or cycle in the countryside.

Cyclists are more than three times as likely to be killed per mile travelled on a rural road than an urban road. So inhospitable are country lanes to cycling that a Devon friend recently opted to train for a South Africa cycling trip completely in the gym. Not what she had envisaged when she moved to the countryside.

Air pollution

It is indisputable that overall air quality is better in rural areas. And yet, sometimes when I step out on a cold day and all my neighbours are burning wood, the air quality is palpably worse than I ever experience in London.

Recent research at a Slovenian village found particle pollution in a valley reached levels of the most polluted cities.

“There’s a growing problem that more and more people have woodburners,” says Prof Roy Harrison, an expert in air quality at the University of Birmingham. “Fortunately the new ones are cleaner, but there are people using the old ones that are very dirty, and in villages where people are burning a lot of wood, especially if in a valley, the pollution might not be swept away. It’s quite unpredictable.”

I am aware of the cognitive dissonance of being ferociously loyal to my woodburner but also worrying about air quality. Buying a cheap monitor elicited terrifying readings for fine particulate matter, or PM2.5. However, Prof Harrison cautions that cheap air quality monitors, those under £100, are useless. “The data they get is almost complete garbage,” he says. “You’ve got to spend quite a lot of money to get a decent one.”

Similarly, air purifiers. “There’s quite a bit of controversy over these. If they simply filter the air, then they can have a beneficial impact. But, in fact, the majority of them contain ionisers, which make ozone, which reacts with other things in the air and makes particulate matter. So a lot of them make things worse rather than better.” It is best, in general, to ventilate with outdoor air.

Even though air pollution is higher in urban areas, Prof Jones says, “It is much lower than a few years ago.” Rather than exhaust fumes, the main source of pollution today is particulates from car brakes, tyres, the road surface and dust blown up from the road, all of which are increasingly prevalent in the growth of traffic on major highways in rural areas. “You see a lot of rather attractive villages split in two by major roads going through them, which is a great shame,” says Prof Harrison.

Food and diet

The countryside may be our larder, but it can be hard to find something to eat when you need to. “We know people in the farming community eat more meat, which you’d expect,” says Prof Jones. “But once you go out of the farming and fishing population group, you don’t see a huge effect of people eating more fresh produce than they would do in an urban area.

According to the Consumer Data Research Centre, people in rural areas have less access to supermarkets in general.

“If you’re well off and have a car, and the money to drive, you can drive into an urban area to visit a supermarket,” says Prof Jones. “If you’re not mobile, you might be lucky to have a village store, but food tends to be more expensive and less varied than what you’d find in a large supermarket.”

I will admit that I can afford to shop in my local farm shop, where the veg is magnificent compared with what I find in London. But it is at least a 20-minute round trip. Fine, if I am organised, but no good if you forget something, which I often do. Reed-Felstead agrees: “I eat better in London as it’s just easier to grab healthy things on the go and, if I’m honest, I miss that convenience: there’s certainly no Whole Foods in the countryside.”

Where the countryside has the edge is access to allotments and growing space, if you’re so inclined. I have fresh herbs on tap throughout the year. “We know that people who grow their own fruit and veg tend to eat it as well, that’s fairly obvious. But that’s a small proportion of the population overall,” says Prof Jones.

Mental health

All of the above probably has a bearing on how you feel. It is possible to be surrounded by beautiful green fields and feel trapped, particularly in winter when the hours to access them are limited. However, according to Defra statistics, rural residents typically rate their wellbeing higher than the average scores given by people living in urban areas.

Prof Jones says there aren’t huge differences in mental health between the two: “People might think living in the countryside makes you happy because it’s a nice environment and, indeed, for many people that is the case, but for others it can be quite isolating. People without social networks can struggle. We know the farming community have a high level of suicide, which reflects some of the challenges of what can be harsh rural life on mental health.”

Personally, I’ve worked hard to build social networks in the village where I live. I try to get outside at least once during the working day, even if it’s just to walk two minutes down the lane and turn back again. Every little helps.

There is magic in the countryside that is lacking in the city. “In London, most of my neighbours are terrified of looking me in the eye in case they make a connection and have to follow that up with a smile next time I see them,” laughs Reed-Felstead.

So what is better for you; countryside or city? “It depends,” says Prof Jones. “If you have the wealth and the mobility to enjoy the countryside, I think it has a lot in its favour.”

Many do choose with age to sell up and move closer to a town for the convenience it provides.

My step count might be shocking, and I might detest the time I have to spend in the car in the countryside, but rural living is its own special, indefinable thing that I love.

Although I’m not quite sure I’m ready to stay put there full-time just yet. Or maybe I just need a dog.