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The Royal Agriculture Show, September 2000. Once upon a time, I flew through the night in a helicopter from the Lancashire coast to London. It was a full moon. A thousand feet below stretched England, its cities, towns and villages neatly delineated by houses and street lights. Bradford, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Workshop, Nottingham, Kettering and Milton Keynes glittering like distant constellations, threaded together by the meteors and shooting stars of motorways.

Mercifully shorn of their grim, grey, close-up civic ghastliness, they looked pristine and enchanting. The country crumpled and folded, patched and darned with centuries of use, resting from its labours, lay snug, invisible. The jigsaw fairy lights appeared ephemeral; the dark, immemorial and timeless. Over it all, spinning flakes of snow fell to glaze every field and hedge, copse, covert, root and branch. It all looked so heart-stoppingly, pitifully fragile.

We live, you and I, in a communally agreed white lie. We believe this is a rural country, a “country” country. Of course, empirically we understand that England is one of the world’s most densely populated nations, more hugger-mugger than India or China or Switzerland; we know that, having put industry into revolution years before anyone else, there hasn’t been a soul who could honestly answer to the name of peasant for 200 years.

We know that the nation’s wealth is all made indoors, that power has passed from the Whigs of the land to the Tories and socialists of the smoke-filled room. We hardly need reminding that the country is peristaltic with cars, screaming with claustrophobia. All this we know and yet…and yet we also know that, if we had a mind to, we could all stand shoulder to shoulder on the Isle of Wight and see in the distance an empty, green and pleasant land. When we close our eyes and think of England, we see country lanes and thatched cottages, a patchwork of fields, the organised randomness of a Gregorian park.

Even though the chances are that you’re reading this in a place where your neighbour is just the other side of a wall, and your horizons are never further than 15ft, and where if you saw a sheep you’d call the police, you still persist in thinking we live in a country with dotted urban set-aside, rather than a rolling, sprawling suburb with occasional fields. It’s there, just up the road, out of sight. This real England, your unreal home, turns us all into maundering John of Gaunts, sighing over sceptred isles, demi-paradises, other Edens. So how come the country is in such a parlous state, crippled and bankrupt, depressed to the point of eating the shotgun?

If we love it so, if it’s the cradle of our identity, why are we complacently rubbernecking as it’s turned into our own homemade Kosovo? The litany of sorrows that afflicts the country is wearyingly familiar. Debt, poverty, exhaustion, burglary, vandalism, vigilantism, migration, depression, poisoned land, poisoned food, organic loonies, no transport, closed post offices, closed shops and wandering bands of offensively dressed ramblers.

Some of these also afflict towns and cities, but somehow they seem worse in the delicate green bits. Even songbirds are leaving. Ruralistics are mad, mad with despair, call-the-Samaritans mad, with the righteous fury of victims made second-class refugees in their own back yards by weekend-dream property prices and rock-bottom farming. They are surrounded by an ignorant urbanity that on one hand ignores them, and on the other tells them how to keep sheep and grow onions.

I set off into the mud and the blood to uncover the strategies the heart and soul of Olde England, with its back to the dry-stone-wall, is planning for its survival. The Royal Agricultural Show at Stoneleigh seemed the place to find out – a great beer-tent-and-bacon-butty get-together of the clans of round-vowelled, clotted-faced ruralists.

It starts badly. You have to go to Coventry. Through the train window the Midlands drift away into the sodden mist. To a city boy it looks as it always has. The bucolic war of attrition and scorched earth of the past 20 years they keep telling us about have had little visible effect: this is still the landscape of my childhood. Those hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of miles of hedge that have been grubbed up every week since the war, well, I’m damned if I can see where they went. Olde England must have been a sunless maze that stretched from Penzance to Carlisle. I think they’re lying. Lying, or selective embellishment, is one of the things I associate with rural folk, that and sex without foreplay.

Disappointingly, Stoneleigh isn’t actually in the country, it’s one of those golf-club and ornamental-willow, Jag-and-water-feature suburbs. The first thing you see is that all the humans have huge hands, and everything else has huge testicles. Perhaps that’s no coincidence. Huge, smugly vicious lads with shaven heads and shit-kicking boots. Having a Hereford on a rope beats a rottweiler any day. The black Angus bulls have such short legs that their gonad clearance is less than a Lamborghini’s. Bit-swinging bovines are paraded in the ring in a simulacrum of a Mr Universe competition; absurd judges in bowler hats and mothy suits dribble over muscle and leather like old queens in a biker bar. Each yob has a long stick with a hook on the end, with which they gently and rhythmically rub the bull’s pizzles. Now, I’m sorry, but slow cluster-frotting a rib roast comes right at the end of truly weird things to do. Sheep have their tails lifted, pigs scamper and swerve like fly halves, chased by ready-rubbed, shag-breathed men waving trays advertising banks. Why pigs will be impressed by low-interest flexible mortgage TV dinners is beyond me, but then what do I know?

The sheer ingenuity and variety of breeds are a wonder. Could you tell your Beltex from your Berrichon du Cher, or Black Welsh Mountain, Bleu du Maine, Clun Forest, Hampshire Down, North Country Cheviot, Southdown, Romney, Wensleydale, Exmoor Horn, Herdwick, Lleyn, Oxford Down, Vendéen, Bluefaced Leicester, Devon Closewool, Dorset Down, Texel, Rouge de l’Ouest, Swaledale, or the fabled, mysterious Lonk?

I thought not. But there are men who can and do, and they feel unloved, harassed and marginalised as they tenderly wander their hands up and down shaved inner thighs. Those are just sheep. Cows come in an equally wondrous diversity, from the phychopathic midget Dexter to the bovinely provocative Belgian Blue with its double-muscled buttocks. It all makes you wonder what God could have done if he hadn’t rushed the job in a week.

Each breed was carefully forged from forced copulations over hundreds of generations. In these rings it is possible to see the countryside as one vast Nazi brothel, producing specialist ϋber-races. Take Yorkshire’s large white pig, bred with long legs, york-ham legs smoked over the sawdust and chips from the oak beams that for a century were used to make York minister. Crossed with the Landrace, it was taught Italian and sent to live in the damp northern Po valley, where it became the parma-ham pig. Its long legs were bred so that it could be driven to market across remote Yorkshire dales (pigs aren’t naturally great walkers.) Every breed of beast has a similar story, a quaint specialisation that is mutely told in muscle and hide, in hoof and horn. For 3,000 years they have been our help meats. They’ve been led to the slaughter, through feast and famine, feeding an urban progress that would make their uniqueness obsolete.

It’s the heavy horses that reveal just how de trop they all are. Great dumb things, Shires and Percherons, Clydesdales and cobs, with moon-boot feet and brains the size of walnuts. Nobody can pretend that these equine oiks are anything more than garden furniture, but they do pretend, they put them in front of carts and drays and make believe that the world is still cobbled.

An utter belief in the goodness of horses is one of the totemic truths that separate town from country. In the town, nobody in their right mind would put a 14-year old girl on a motor scooter with an engine of a Magimix, but in the country every pre-teen is encouraged to sit on top of half a tonne of frothing, glossy, bonkers imbecility which can go at 40mph across six lanes of traffic through barbed wire fence, roll over and pogo and then kick a Range Rover into its constituent parts. There are said to be more horses in Britain now than there were before the invention of the internal combustion engine. That they serve no useful purpose other than to give work to strapping girls with pitchforks, and to act as a catalyst for rural adultery, is something you couldn’t conceivably question at Stoneleigh. Heritage trumps utility, or even common sense, every time.

It’s no accident that the issue ruralists have chosen to dig in their heels about is horses. Of all the fields they could have made a stand in, fox-hunting is the least fortuitous: an expensive, faintly absurd recreation. But it is a clear demarcation between them and us. Hunting is clearly, unequivocally rural. In the ring, no equinity is left unworshipped: hitching, harnessing, plaiting, braiding, kiddies on leader reins, contests by age, height, breed and sex; they skitter past for three days, like Genghis Khan’s Girl Guides. My favourite, far and away the most camply ridiculous, is a woman whose nag syncopates to light opera as she tells her life story over the Tannoy, rider and mount erotically heavy-breathing as one.

Extraordinary, weirdly beautiful though the animals are, they’re no more than nostalgic pets, couture catwalk creatures, amazing but impractical and expensive, and you won’t see them in the shops next season. The bulls with their mighty meat-and-two-veg have been cuckolded by the rubber gloves and turkey basters of the artificial inseminators, mild-mannered little men who have achieved macho nirvana. A schooner of bovine DNA is the price of Sunday lunch at a Harverster.

Insemination stalls dot the ground, their walls boasting large, glossy photographs of provocative heifers, posed to display their mighty, round, pink udders. They’re just page-three lovelies with obscenely eager teats. A brochure for a bull called Figaro (“who ranks with Jed, Jogger and Jolt” – even the names seem like a tacky porn movie) has a cover like a Beatrix Potter Penthouse, a huge, globular cleavage with two erect nipples and a headline that shouts: “Udders that are a joy to milk at 5am!” A pinstripe salesman in a company tie with matching grin comes over: “Have you been seen to?” This is not a good opening gambit if you’re selling artificial insemination, but then that’s the other thing about the country: they don’t get their own innate, rude, mechanical, comic irony. They think a sticker saying, “Young farmers do it twice a day with manure,” is funny. They don’t see anything risible in handing out posters of gargantuan ruminant knockers for your bedroom wall.

There are tents selling the potless countryside things they didn’t know they needed: nonslip cattle flooring, portable milk pasteurisers; banks and Shylock companies that will kindly squeeze a few extra drops of interest out of the mortgage; a coffee tent run by fundamentalist Christians, estuary-vowelled Elmer Gantrys. Along with the Nescafé, they are offering, if not divine hope, at least an Old Testament explanation of the evil and wickedness that got farmers into this mire.

I picked up a useful pamphlet, Where Did Cain Get His Wife?, by the wonderfully named Ken Ham. If Ken has found out, the young farmers would love to know – they are desperate. No, they’re really desperate. In the door of the young farmers’ tent stands a jolly, rotund chap. “Sign our petition, sir.” He rattles a tin. For a couple of coins I get a bit of knotted rope with a pin. It’s the young farmers’ Blue Peter version of an Aids ribbon. It looks like a noose. Is this to remind us that you’re all hanging yourselves? “No,” he says, with a mildly shocked incomprehension. “It’s to show your support for young farmers. Would you like to look at our homemade puppet competition inside?” Do you know, I don’t think I could bear it. There’s only so much pathos a man can handle in a lifetime. “Are you a young farmer?” I ask. Not exactly, he lives in Guildford, but he’d like to be.

Well away from the four-legs-good paddock is the four-wheels-better prairie. A great herd of no less glossy and pampered machinery, whose heritage is as noble – from the first bone ploughs, through Jethro Tull’s seed drill and the Georgian fascination for technological farming. Primary-coloured kindergarten kit the size of Bovis starter homes, costing about as much. Behemoths with retractable arms and articulated grabbers, shovers, cutters, wrappers, stereophonic sound and air-con. There’s stuff that you couldn’t even guess the use of. Sort of Jules Verne meets Wacky Races. It all looks so 1980s, a bosky equivalent of the red braces and conspicuous-consumption Porsches and Ferraris.

This is a loadsa-agrimoney kit from when EEC grants and set-aside subsidies flowed like milk quotas, but nobody’s buying now. Salesmen stand in bored stupefaction, as the sign-on-the-dotted-line champagne goes flat. Only a few small boys play in the cabs. Both the machines and ring animals are generally ignored. Just a smattering of grooms and judges and the salmon-hatted wives of supermarket sponsors waiting to hand out rosettes watch with a wake-like reverence.

There are crowds, not huge enough to make the place look more than half full, but crammed into temporary arcades of shops. They consume with a duty-free fervour. Shopping is, after all, the great pan-rural and urban pastime. No longer, do the grey legions of workers spend their precious leisure time walking the chalky downs, or being Mr Polly and bicycling the byways for refreshing half-pints of scrumpy. We are not a nation of shopkeepers but a nation of shop grazers, and this, it turns out, is the real point of a rural fair. Confronted with the catastrophic decline in traditional farming, the best advice Mr Blair and the serried ranks of civil servants from the Ministry of Agriculture could come up with, was that bumpkins should think about starting cottage Macjobs (that’s Macdonald as in had-a-farm, not turned-the-surplus-cattle-into-burgers). They’ve gone at it with alacrity, turning medieval copses into paintball playgrounds or corporate bonding camps. Barns are agri-dating agencies, internet picnic-hamper purveyors. Milking parlours are aromatherapy yoga temples, weekend B & Bs, golden-years knocking shops.

There’s this Stoneleigh peripatetic refugee camp of craftiness, where Pacamac-ed trippers can ruminate on blind-man’s-bluff knitwear, rainwear, leisurewear, comfeewear, tacked out in one-size-fits-all nylon and polyester. An Oxfam of elastic-waistbanded nastiness, slobby suburban weekend clothes masquerading as hunting, shooting and riding gear. There are the jolly good ideas born out of late-night-by-the-Aga desperation. Sticks that are plastic shopping-bag holders, wooden fruit, small smiley reptiles, all-in-one twin-footed fake-fur slippers, comic dog-lead hooks, plastic bag storers, unpatented original coaster holders, crumpet cosies, draught excluders, boot removers, drawer liners, scented knicker bags, scented knickers, shoe dryers and cat sensory deprivation boxes. There are department-store tents of amateur watercolourists, amateur kiddie crocheters, flower dryers, mud turners, cancerous candle makers, rag-doll knotters and metal benders. And sad, defunct craft proselytisers: coracle makers, three-legged-stool bodgers, fletchers and a dozen men doing a dozen pointless things with birch twigs. All these finger-and-thumb people eke out a living going from game fair to stately-home vintage-car rally, flogging this remnant-and-rag rubbish, that brightly screaming kitsch. A polite underclass of hatchback and picnic-table-tinkers.

There’s the bottom-line thing about the country. It has no taste whatsoever. The closest country folk ever get to aesthetics is whimsy. They have the artistic sensibility of a sugared-up class of seven-year-olds. You can never have too many patterns, too much chintz or frills or clutter. They knick-knack the world in an eye-grating nausea.

The real pollution of the countryside is, unfortunately, country people. Culture is unequivocally urban, the very word “civilisation” comes from the same root as “civic”. This island’s 3,000-year pilgrimage of progress has been a one-way street towards the city. City ideas, city sensibilities, aesthetics and sophistication, thank God. In the middle of Stoneleigh’s vital, vivid vileness I found a thing (it could only be described as a thing) so perfectly, stunningly horrible, it encapsulated the yawning gap between us and them. A jolly husband and wife spend a post-retirement gypsy life selling home-made calico cats doused in lavender oil. They are not just hideous Victorian cabbage-patch cats: they have a unique use. They are vacuum-cleaner covers. Nothing in the country is too mundane to avoid a posy cloche. “Oh yes, they’re very popular,” the vibrant lady tells me. “We’re very up to date. We do one specially for Dyson. They’re particularly popular. Dysons are so ugly, aren’t they? Mine’s yellow, grey and purple, much nicer under a cat.” There you have it. In the city, Dyson is a byword for design excellence. A thing of contemporary beauty, almost an icon of metropolitan chic and the way we live now. The synthesis of form and function. In the country they dress it up with an anthropomorphic bedtime dolly, turning Cool Britannia into an Edwardian whatnot.

I once read that in battle the most dangerous thing you could do was run away. It’s primeval. A fight-and-flight deal. You stop being the enemy and become prey; stabbing you in the back gets that much easier. The country is running away. It whinges and begs as it retreats, and we, from the fastness of our concrete-and-steel high-rise castles, despise it. Rural folk no longer earn our respect as the ruddy yeomen of England, the sinew of the nation. John Bull is now John the Semen Inseminator. The countryside doesn’t have an identifiable cohesion or identity. They dress like us, but cheaper. They want the same things, but tackier. The country is a kitsch, twinky suburb populated by humourless nostalgic junkies, who demand money not with menace but mutters. If they put up a fight, parked their vast Tonka tanks on our lawns, burnt wicker men in town centres, turned some of their sulphurous weedkiller into bombs, we’d fear them, and fear is the father of respect. Instead we pity them, and they fly off the handle one at a time, spraying pig shit over holiday homes, waving sticks at ramblers and shooting a dog.

Their conservative, long-suffering stoicism, wilful ignorance, a masochistic, cloud-watching pessimism, and an almost psychedelic pleasure in being able to say, “I told you so,” are utterly out of kilter with the modern world. The urban consensus is, well, just let them sink in their own slurry. We all have to live by market forces, let rural folk feel the sharp edge of international commerce and thatched-property inflation. They’re never going to put the clock back to 1910. They’re never going to be anything more than a profitless, subsidised, medieval craft collective. Why don’t we just put them out of their misery, dump the whole lot in a bumper edition of Country Life, and flog it to people who can privately underwrite the losses in exchange for the use of the vista - fizzy-brained pop stars, mobile-phone millionaires and time-share antique dealers? They’ll replant the hedges and grow insanely expensive vegetables for fun. They’ll keep a few rare breeds to beef up the view from the dining room. Country folk can seep into the job market, become housekeepers, gardeners and minicab drivers.

Yet something stops us throwing them to the wolves (As if farmers didn’t have enough to worry about, some Islington loony is trying to reintroduce wolves.) That something is diversity. Cities breed uniformity. Propinquity means sameness, we all wear black, we all own a Dyson. It’s the country that grows variation in language, in behaviour, in outlook and mood. The centuries that gave us a plethora of variegated sheep, cows and chickens were symbiotic in turn and forced an eclectic and vigorous difference in people. We would be poorer without that. The country is the urban imagination’s raw material, a place of inspiration, albeit better in the mind’s eye than stuck on the sole of your shoe. The eliding rural sameness germinates; the frantic city consumes.

The country is home to that peculiarly English natural resource, eccentricity. In the city, an eccentric wields a double-decker shopping trolley and shouts at traffic; in the country, he probably shuffles in odd socks to a shed and slowly, organically, invents something. Mostly, it’s a stick for carrying shopping bags, or a better mug tree, but occasionally it’s a sextant, a Davy lamp, or a jet engine. Or perhaps just some piece of minutely correlated onanism that has a rare and useless fascination. The bottom line? The country’s greatest invention is the city. Only through the tireless, plodding seasons have we been able to devise a society where not everyone has to till and reap. Some of us, then most of us, could leave the harvest home, go off and be investment managers, lap dancers, television presenters and poets, secure in the knowledge that others would mind the farm. We owe the country. In the end, wouldn’t we all like to finish up in some dappled country churchyard, finally at one with the land? Though personally I devoutly hope I’m dead first.

I don’t want to be a Northumbrian dry-stone wall layer. I don’t want my children to lay dry-stone walls. I don’t even want a dry-stone wall. But I’m quite pleased that someone out there in the darkness is still doing it. For such a small place, this island has maintained a bewildering number of locally specialised human adaptations, and we would be worse off without them.

Oh, but wouldn’t it be so much easier to fight for the country’s corner if they weren’t all so dreadfully, embarrassingly, uniquely, personally unprepossessing?

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