Rutland appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Roteland, which means simply the land belonging to Rota, an Old English personal name meaning the pleasant or cheerful one. That etymology has aged well. The county is small, rural, mostly limestone and ironstone, with hedgerow-edged fields rising and falling across low hills. There are exactly two towns: Oakham in the west, with its Norman castle and its tradition of demanding a horseshoe from every passing peer of the realm, and Uppingham in the south, whose Tuesday market was granted by Edward I in 1281. The highest point of the county is Cold Overton Park at 646 feet above sea level. The lowest is a quiet corner of farmland near Belmesthorpe at 56 feet, on the edge of the Fens. Between those two points lies a county the motto of which, on its coat of arms, is multum in parvo: much in little.

The 1958 to 1967 Local Government Commission for England looked at Rutland and concluded that a county with the population of a small market town was indefensible. The first draft proposals would have split Rutland in two, sending Ketton east into a new Cambridgeshire and the western portion into Leicestershire. The final proposal was more modest: absorb the whole county into Leicestershire as a single rural district. Rutland refused. The local Conservative Party campaigned against its own government. There were publicity stunts, including the battleship. On 1 August 1963, the Minister of Housing and Local Government, Sir Keith Joseph, announced that the merger would not happen, calling Rutland's case unique. Historians later suggested that two recent by-elections, in Orpington and Leicester North East, had given the government cause to back off. Rutland was given a reprieve. Eleven years later, in the 1974 local government reorganisation, it was abolished anyway, becoming a district of Leicestershire. The reprieve had only been delay. The full restoration as a unitary authority came in 1997, and the resurrected county has been pleased with itself ever since.

Until the 1970s, Rutland was iron country. The ironstone under the fields fed the steelworks at Corby, and walking draglines the size of small buildings stripped the topsoil off entire pastures. When the Exton quarries closed in 1973, a 1,675-ton dragline named Sundew was no longer needed at Exton, but was wanted at Stewarts and Lloyds' Corby quarries thirteen miles south. So Sundew walked. Over eight weeks in 1974, the giant machine stepped across Rutland and Northamptonshire fields on its enormous shoes, crossing roads under police escort, and the BBC children's programme Blue Peter filmed it. Pictures of the dragline striding past a small Rutland hedgerow look like something from a Hayao Miyazaki film. The ironstone work that built Corby is over now. The walking dragline is gone too. But the journey of Sundew has become part of how Rutland remembers itself.

In 2012 the Office for National Statistics published a well-being report that found Rutland to be the happiest county in mainland Britain. Rutland also has the highest fertility rate of any English county at 2.81 children per woman, ranks 348th out of 354 on the Indices of Deprivation, became the fourth Fairtrade county in 2007, and was the first county in England to offer a county-wide public electric-vehicle charging network. Until November 2020, Rutland was also the last English county without a McDonald's, a distinction held with deliberate pride and then surrendered with mild regret. The county is the supposed home of the parody rock band the Rutles, who first appeared on Eric Idle's Rutland Weekend Television. It is also, less famously, the setting for several novels by Peter F. Hamilton, who lives there.

Building stone tells you what a place is made of. In Rutland the walls and field boundaries are limestone and ironstone, and the older roofs are Collyweston stone slate, a fissile pale grey slate split out of nearby quarries. The Ketton Cement Works quarry exposes the best section of the Lincolnshire limestone formation in the country, and at its base sits a bed of dirty white sandy silt that gave the Rutland Formation its name. At Great Casterton a sauropod called Cetiosaurus oxoniensis was pulled from the ground in 1968. At Whissendine the Banks are still let each March, on the third week, a ceremony that predates anyone alive. In Barrowden, reeds are still gathered on St Peter's eve and strewn on the church floor. Multum in parvo. Much, in little.