Cobbett's Rural Rides is a diary of his journeying on horseback around southern England in the years 1822–6. He ranged south of the Thames from Kent tb Somerset, and north of the Thames in Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire. He does not treat most of the Midlands, the North, East Anglia, or parts of the British Isles outside England, though some of these areas were covered in other articles in his Political Register that were not included in the 1830 collection. Rural Rides is a description of and commentary upon what he sees and does. He describes the landscape, the crops, the towns, villages, farms and inns, the country estates, and the people he meets. The description is larded with commentary upon the times, and this is our main concern. But the commentary and the description cannot be disentangled, for his perception is coloured by his moral, social, and political concerns.

The rides begin during the nadir of the postwar agricultural depression. Prices of farm produce have collapsed, as Cobbett demonstrates in his reports of the fairs he visits. For example, at the Weyhill sheep fair of 1822, the turnover has fallen from £300,000 a few years ago to £70,000 (58). This spells ruin for farmers who rent and work the land; for rents, fixed when prices were high, remain high even though prices and therefore farming incomes have slumped.