I stood in a field this week, listening to the first sounds of spring. The birds sang ardently, mocking the winter. Lambs were bleating in the sunshine. The earth was stirring with a tissue of inaudible sounds, the whispers of leaves uncurling and vegetation growing.

To observe the seasonal rhythm so closely is deeply comforting. It's also one of the pleasures of living in rural Britain. This winter has been mild, but the earliest hint of spring, and the resurrection of the land it promises, is a key moment in the year. It is a time when our hearts fill with hope, a time when our faith in the British countryside is renewed once again.

I was surprised then to read about the launch, last Wednesday, of Over the Hill?, a national campaign to warn retirees against moving from the city to the country. Mavis Cheek, prolific author and countryside dweller, is the mouthpiece of this campaign against chasing Arcadia. She described rural life as "tough, a little bit dangerous and not for wimps". Apparently she'll be returning to live in the city before she becomes too "feeble". Too feeble for what? Riding a bull or pressing flowers?

The campaign attempts to dispel myths about the countryside that few people who live there would recognise. The idyll containing the village green, hollyhocks and roses spilling out of a cottage garden, dancing around the maypole and a time-ripened landlord pulling pints of foaming ale ceased being a common reality long ago.

It probably was all pastoral bliss once. In her seminal book about the British landscape, A Land, published in 1951, Jacquetta Hawkes wrote: "Recalling in tranquillity the slow possession of Britain by its people, I cannot resist the conclusion that the relationship reached its greatest intimacy, its most sensitive pitch, about two hundred years ago." Since then the Industrial Revolution, the modern agricultural revolution and the automobile have eaten up much of Eden. Today, large tracts of the "countryside" are covered in factories, motorways, retail parks and light industrial sites. Still, I wouldn't live anywhere else.

I moved to a small farmhouse in the Black Mountains, south Wales, eight years ago. It wasn't a seamless integration. The fact that I ride a bicycle every day aroused suspicion. In the countryside you only use a bike if, well, something is wrong. The local hill farmers watched me pedal in and out of Abergavenny every day, and wondered.

Five months after moving in, I was in the pub high up on a hillside, not far from home, on a Friday night. An old boy I knew only by the name of his farm cupped my elbow and led me gently to a corner of the bar. He fixed me with a stern gaze and tapped the end of his nose with a crooked finger: "I see you on the bike, boy," he said. "How long you lost your licence for then?"

Before the move, I lived in London for a decade. There are many things I still miss about metropolitan life. If I ever had to follow Mavis Cheek back to the city, though, I'd miss the countryside more: significantly, there are things I couldn't now live without – carrying logs into the house; the sound of wind in the woods; the continuous, incremental change in the landscape; buying meat from a local smallholder; the ampleness of time; the antique peace; the sweet-drugging scent of high summer; walking the dogs down the track at night, listening to tawny owls; the moonlight's silver illuminating the stream beneath the house; the community.

In the city, you choose your community. It may be through work, your football team, a book club, the allotment group, your kids' school or your peers. It's unlikely, however, to include your neighbours. You may weave in and out of three or four different communities in the course of a weekend, and still not know the name of a single person who lives on your street. In the countryside, your neighbours are your only community.

I'm lucky. I live in a place with a strong sense of community. My local pub is an active part of that. There are celebrations on key days in the calendar; children and dogs are welcome; the landlord accepts home deliveries on our behalf when we're out, and the beer is well kept and cheap. We have two village halls. Between them, there are activities or meetings every night of the week – singing workshops, the garden club, line dancing, keep-fit classes and the WI – as well as monthly films ("flicks in the sticks"), occasional quiz nights and the odd touring play. Every two years, Cwmyoy Hall stages a pantomime. It's always a sellout. You can be a cultural snob and cock a snook at all this – and urban people often do – but the point is that no one need feel excluded. To misquote Adlai Stevenson, "people get the type of community they deserve" – it's why I'm on the community council. The Over the Hill? campaign warns against old people becoming isolated in the countryside: you'd have to consciously choose to be, round here.

My friend Jim Keates runs Cwmyoy Hall as a volunteer. He moved to the country 12 years ago, aged 61, "knowing virtually no one," he said. "Now I know everyone. It's a much more social place. People are far more prepared to share their lives, with honesty."

This winter, I've spent a lot of time on my own in a wood near home, filming the video diary for a BBC4 series about British woodlands. When my father died recently, these sessions working alone in the wood were an anchor of my stability. The emotional buoyancy of a few solitary hours is something most people in the countryside would see as the norm. In the city, it's a luxury.

The wood is on a steep bank of old red sandstone above the River Honddu at the entrance to the Vale of Ewyas. It is likely that trees – mainly ash, oak, alder, hazel, birch and hawthorn – have stood continuously here for some 8,000 years, managed throughout by man. It struck me recently that my experience working this wood, albeit with different tools, is similar to that of the Neolithic man who first sharpened a heavy flint axe and tentatively set about felling a tree 5,000 years or 200 generations ago.

I find this connection to the human matrix profoundly moving: it's something city life cannot provide. Standing beneath the dome of St Paul's Cathedral or in front of Turner's The Fighting Temeraire in the National Gallery might be great experiences, but they don't match standing still in an ancient wood.

Of course, retirees are unlikely to be managing woods, but the point is that you have to put your hands to work to get an inkling of the "intimacy" with the countryside that Hawkes wrote of. It is still there.

To extract meaning and significance from the countryside, you have to dig the earth, grow vegetables and flowers, plant trees, pick sloes and blackberries, fashion a walking stick, cut the grass and make jam. There's a task for every age. "First the tool, then the book," the writer and ecologist John Stewart Collis wrote. Perhaps Mavis Cheek is heading back to the city because she got this the wrong way round.

Rob Penn is the author of It's All About the Bike: the Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels, published by Penguin