visiting rural spaces and cultures continues to be framed by cultural worlds in which individuals live. Television, literature, film and artwork inter penetrate other fields of knowledge of the imag ined, material and sensuous character of cultures and the physical contours of geography outside cities and towns a shorthand for the complexity and paradox around which rurality may be understood. A range of cultural contexts medi- ates the aesthetic of contemporary life, shapes the aesthetic values and meanings that individu- als make, and seek, in what they consume (U 1995). One of these numerous influences is the diverse content of the tourism industry a complexity agents and agencies, private and public, lacking in coherence. That 'industry' works within and alongside these other cultural worlds, drawing upon their fragments to present the rural as material objects for profit and enjoy- ment and to influence its future, for example as sustainable environments. In the process, the material and imaginative content of the rural is multiply refigured. Ideas of authenticity and of the new combine in hybrid forms.