'Coming up in the next hour we'll have a report on England's green, or rather not so green, and pleasant land,' announced Radio 4's Today Programme presenter Sarah Montague, trailing an item on the country's disappearing meadows.

'What? What!' I exclaimed, shocked out of my morning torpor. It was just before 7am and raining heavily outside, the wind wildly rattling the cratch cover at the front of the boat, and I was trying to stir myself into casting off so that I would be in Manchester in good time to find a decent mooring.

I'd been looking forward to a taste of city life again, meeting up with a few chums for a chat in the fug of an urban boozer. But Ms Montague's casual caricature brought back with a bang just how insular metropolitan life can be. This was urban Britain talking, the view of the city where most of us live. But it is also a Britain that rarely gets out and about, and when it does it is usually to rush from one town to another along steel and concrete corridors.

Just the day before - a glorious late spring sunny day, full and fat and utterly utterly green - had seen Stealaway puttering away, the engine gurgling with delight in the deep draught of the Bridgewater Canal. Eschewing the unattractive proposition of an 'assisted passage' into Liverpool, I'd instead headed south to clock the newly reopened Anderton lift, which raises or lowers boats in caissons of water more than 50ft between the River Weaver Navigation and the Trent and Mersey Canal. Out of service for a couple of decades, the now Scheduled Ancient Monument has been restored to its hydraulically rammed splendour.

Alas just north of the lift, a breach in the canal has put the T&M out of commission over a half-mile stretch, its normally hidden clay-puddled bowl now dry and open to the sky like an encrusted wound. But Stealaway made it easily enough to within walking distance of the lift, having turned off the Bridgewater east of Runcorn, where it used to lock down to the Mersey to link Manchester and Liverpool and so provide the key to the power and prosperity of both cities in the late eighteenth century.

Opened in stages over a decade, the Bridgewater carried its first cargoes between the two cities in 1776, although its creator, the talented but untutored genius, James Brindley, didn't live to see its completion. It's magnificent canal, wide and lock-free throughout its length, in contrast to Brindley's other great masterpiece, the Grand Trunk, linking England's east and west coasts. The Trent and Mersey, as the GT is now known, is an altogether more intimate affair, despite its grand horizons, made even grander when the millwright turned water engineer from Leek linked it to the River Severn as well.

In over two centuries has blended into the countryside, as much part of it as the woodland and meadows that border it. On that late spring day last week, the land seemed at its best, with scores of shades of green. And not just green, yellow, blue, purple, pink and white as well. One half-mile of woodland cutting was carpeted in a solid mass of billions of bluebells whose colour took away one's breath. Buttercups, daisies and dandelions decorate the grass verges of the towpath in more profusion than a medieval maiden's corsage. There are sedges and rushes, willow herbs, cow parsley and cowslips. With my trusty Collins guide I've managed to identify, yarrow and fleabane, ragwort and ragged robin, various vetches and gorses, and saxifrage, and celendine. And doubtless, I've missed many too.

It's not just Cheshire that's so flush either. Throughout my trip, I have recalled the words of a friend said when a few years ago we were both looking out at the ragged scrub of a Middle Eastern landscape: 'England's so green it's almost obscene,' she said then. It's still true and gives the lie to the 'environmentalists' who howl wolf so often, such as the chap in Suffolk bemoaning the loss of a meadow or two that the Today Programme was reporting.

Let no one be fooled that what we see when we city folk do venture out into the country is mother nature. What we see is the hand of man writ large across this fertile land that has been yielding its produce under our husbandry and for our benefit for thousands of years. Hedgerows come and go; the open fields of medieval strip farmers with their acre plots of 220 by 22 yards (still to be seen on the flatlands around the Isle of Axeholme) or the enclosed pastures of the enlightenment or the intensive market gardens of the drained fens that deliver us our just-in-time fruit and veg: they come and they go. This is a human land on to which mother nature comes as a working guest.

Most entertaining in the countryside, in a bread and circuses sort of way, has been the sweet sounding, but the vicious in deed, life of birds. Last week, I saw a crow harry a heron, which was obviously flying too close to its nest. The crow was beside itself with rage, dive-bombing the heron, which with a couple of languid sweeps of its huge wings would wheel away with the crow in flapping pursuit. Later I saw the tables turned as a shrieking lapwing went for a rook that got to close to its brooding mate. This was an awe-inspiring ariel fight, wheeling and diving until the interloper was driven away. Kingfishers, magpies, curlews and darting little finches; yesterday as I struggled through 27 locks on my own, a yellow wagtail followed me up the last few of the flight waiting for the overflow, as I emptied each lock, to cease so it could feed on the pond life exposed.

Inevitably though it has been the paths of waterbirds that I have crossed, mostly in an unwelcome way at this time of year. Coots and moorhens scurry away as the boat comes along. But not swans, which attack without fear. Even the normally sociable and placid Canada geese can get aroused during this breeding season. Each day on the cut has a soundtrack, dominated by the quack-quack-quacking of the ubiquitous Mallard drakes, driven to randy frustration by the lack of ducks, which are off limits while hatching the next generation. Indeed, it is a miracle that the species thrives as it does, according to one amateur observer I was speaking to last night. Over dinner with her husband on the good n/b Wingletang, she told me of the horrifying scenes she had seen when ducks, back in the water, were set upon by rampaging males, leaving newly hatched ducklings to die.

It would be neat to use the behaviour of Mallards as a metaphor for the city life of Manchester but it may stretching it, though not by much. Don't get me wrong, it is a great Victorian city, with its fantastic Waterhouse Town Hall decorated by improving Ford Madox-Brown murals, and the new Lowry arts complex in the old docklands of Salford, but from the canal it is a disgrace. Some rehabilitation has been made but it is a measure of the city that boaters are recommended to moor only in the redeveloped basin at Castlefield. Anywhere else is a no-no. And with reason.

To climb eastwards out of Manchester one has to pass through the 27 locks before a safe mooring is found, travelling through a city canal littered with junkies' needles and spent condoms. There is so much trash in the cut I had to stop three times to free the fouled propeller, including one time when a discarded bra had wrapped itself around the blades. Manchester may have an open and thriving canalside gay community but there is a seedy side to it as well, as anyone negotiating the dark underground cavern containing locks eight and nine finds out only too soon.

So it is with some relief, if that's not the wrong word, that I'm shot of city life for a fortnight or so, when Birmingham beckons. In the meanwhile the Peaks are just round the corner and I can once more unbolt the doors and hatches and let a little good clean country air back into the boat.

· Mike Holland is writing weekly online dispatches from his canal journey around England. Thanks to the wonders of wireless technology, you can email him at michael.holland4@btinternet.com