It may be true that the past is a different country, but the past I'm looking at now in the photograph in front of me is more like another world. It shows a bleak urban landscape, a series of grim Victorian warehouses lined up along the edge of a lock: an industrial terrace without function or beauty. The towpath is dusty and overgrown after a hot summer, and the only sign of life evident in the scene is a single brightly-coloured narrowboat in the foreground.

The year is 1984 and the boat you can see opposite is mine. It is called Pelikas and that year I had cruised it from the Midlands via the River Trent, mixing it with trains of coal barges which plied the Aire and Calder, to arrive at the start of what was to be my first crossing of England's longest canal.

The derelict urban scene I photographed was the beginning of that journey. It was – astonishingly – Leeds waterfront, almost unrecognisable from what it is today. There is no Royal Armouries Museum, there are no blocks of upmarket waterside apartments. Most of all, there are no people around except Em, my long-suffering other half, who is as keen on the canals as I am.

This was before planners began to realise the potential of the waterways, before waterside loft-living became the ambition of the iPod generation. It was in the days when a bar wasn't a riot of glass and chromium serving exotic cocktails, but a gloomy backstreet dive doling out pints of keg bitter from sticky glasses.

Yet what has been the pattern for Leeds has been the pattern for the rest of Britain. Today, it's the same all over. From Glasgow in the north, to Bristol in the south, from Birmingham to Manchester, Liverpool to London. Wherever you look, these stretches of water linking the remnants of Britain's manufacturing past have become arteries of urban regeneration, harbingers of a new leisure age.

Sometimes I find the transformation unbelievable, but at the same time I feel vindicated by what has happened. In 1984, people thought I was crazy to want to spend time playing around on what they saw as just oily ditches. Whenever the subject came up with my work colleagues, I could sense them edging away from me, the way they might if I'd started arguing for the existence of little green men on the Moon.

Not that it worried me. I was evangelical in my belief that there was a future for the canals. And like most evangelists, I knew I was right. I knew that away from towns, canals were a corridor to a secret rural England which was unmatchable in its beauty, the entrance to a forgotten and mystical world untouched for generations.

Yorkshire, as with so many things, is better endowed with waterways than most other counties. Most people are aware that the River Ouse goes right into the heart of York. Some even know that from there you can get by water to
Ripon. But few grasp the scale of the 128-mile-long Leeds and Liverpool canal which for years was the jewel in the
crown of the 3,000-mile-long British waterways system.

Once it was the only surviving canal of the three which crossed the Pennines, threading its way out of Leeds, past the astonishing five locks, at Bingley, to reach Skipton, the gateway to the Dales.

It was the pure beauty of the canal which attracted me nearly 25 years ago, and which has brought me back to it many times since.

But now it has a rival, and it was in order to explore this that I returned to Yorkshire when, for the first time, it became possible to cruise a ring composed of the two other trans-Pennine canals which had been opened after long and costly restoration.

The Huddersfield Narrow Canal starts in the centre of the town and storms the Pennines like a squaddie with his sergeant-major barking at him.
At Standedge, it burrows under the
hills towards Manchester through Britain's highest, deepest and longest tunnel, 5,029 metres long – more than three miles.

The Rochdale Canal, by comparison, rises more gradually, ambling out of Manchester through some of its most unprepossessing suburbs until it finally reaches the Yorkshire summit where, suddenly, the landscape changes and the purple heather-clad hills drop into the water and heron feed along the towpath.

It was a journey I wouldn't have missed, but even so it was one I wouldn't have undertaken so lightly had I known just how difficult it would prove to be. These waterways aren't so much canals as long lock flights. And these long lock flights weren't what I'd come to expect from the flatlands of the Midlands where I'd done most of my boating.

For a start, the paddle gear – the mechanism that allows you to release the water and open and close lock gates – was often jammed solid. Things have improved considerably since, but in those early years following their reopening, getting lock gear to function was often like trying to jemmy open a rusty safe. It took you into hernia territory.

But worse was the water.

When the idea for these canals was first mooted in the late 18th century, they were planned with complex systems of reservoirs to feed the summit level which, in turn, feeds the locks. But over the years, especially on the Huddersfield Narrow, the reservoirs had fallen into disrepair; or worse, been sold off to Yorkshire Water. I'd often find myself in the middle of characteristic Yorkshire summer weather – which is to say, in the middle of a long period of heavy rain – only to be sitting on the bottom of the canal with not enough water to float on.

On more than one occasion, I got stuck actually in the lock chambers, once having to be rescued by a 12-year-old. Seeing what a pickle I was in, and being a true son of the county, he managed to screw £10 out of me for the privilege.

You couldn't help but smile. And it
was smiling that kept me going, despite the adversity. There's something about the canals that attracts oddballs, whether they're boaters, dog walkers
or ubiquitous fishermen. It is part of their charm.

Along the way, I met grumpy old blokes and lippy kids; I encountered the improbable, the impossible and the plain ridiculous.

One sunny afternoon in Marsden I watched as a young bloke in posh jeans and a white T-shirt, with a mobile phone glued to his ear, walked straight into the canal. And when I say that, I don't mean he strayed over the edge and gave himself a wet foot, or that he slipped and went tumbling. What I mean is that he walked straight into the water up to his waist as if it was on his route,
striding into it with such purpose you'd think he'd got an appointment with the bottom.

As a Midlander by birth, and a Londoner by adoption, I learned to love the wonderful countryside of West Yorkshire. And it is wonderful. Not twee and pretty like other parts of the county, nor a wilderness either; but hard, functional and utilitarian, a landscape of swelling hills topped by dark moorland and threaded with rows of stout grey houses built of stone to withstand proper weather, not that mollycoddling stuff we call weather south of the Trent.

I guess at the end of it, I fell in love with this part of Yorkshire. The journey I took I completed in a single summer, but so much did I enjoy it, I made it twice more over the following three years, eventually finding a mooring in Yorkshire where I enjoyed the first proper winter I'd had since I was a kid, when I got iced-in at Hebden Bridge.

I somehow suspect it won't be long before I'm back again.

n Steve Haywood is the author of Narrowboat Dreams, published by Summersdale, £7.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is £2.75.