Every year, thousands of Belgian citizens in imperial soldiers’ uniforms parade through the streets of about a hundred villages of the Entre-Sambre-et-Meuse region, in Francophone Belgium. The growing success enjoyed by these “folk walks” stems most notably from their inherent yet remarkable potential for constructing and combining a wide range of both social affiliation and differentiation processes. In particular, they reflect social and identity dynamics that have arisen in rural Walloon areas that for decades have been undergoing major changes. Participating in the walks thus allows recreating a localness that can ground collective identification. This social construction accommodates the growing diversity in participants’ profiles and trajectories, be it genealogy, professional mobility or even place of dwelling. This construction, moreover, is not merely discursive. Rather, it is built by the parades and their activities and materialized through folk practises and artefacts. In this context, the theoretical urban-rural division is used as a repertoire of practices and representations in order to emphasize and materialize the affiliation to the village and, more widely, a sense of being rural.