This paper responds to calls for geographers to engage critically with the claim that ‘violence sits in places’ in the analysis of domestic violence in rural areas. It argues the need to develop conceptual understandings of the spatialized and embodied experience of domestic violence in the countryside. Drawing on debates about what counts as violence and on feminist work on domestic violence as intimate terrorism, the paper explores ways in which experiences of violence (and associated fear) are shaped by particular constructions and performances of rural masculinity and by the social and cultural relations that continue to characterize rural communities.