Mobilities and the English Village: Moving Beyond Fixity in Rural West Yorkshire

‘Rural idyll’ nostalgia situates the English village as timeless, bounded and static. It is contrasted to urban modernity and dynamism. The urban moves; the rural is held still. This has been echoed by limited scholarly engagement with rural mobilities. Against spatio‐temporal boundedness, this article emphasises the centrality of rural mobilities and conceptualises movement as occurring in, of and through the village. Drawing upon ethnographic research undertaken during 2011–2012 in ‘Lyng Valley’, a post‐industrial rural district in West Yorkshire, Northern England, I illustrate the village as on the move in both the past and the present. Arguing for rural mobility as continual and intrinsic, I challenge the concatenation of mobility with urbanity