There were officially 407,791 on last Sunday's Countryside March. It was exciting. As Winston Churchill said: "There is nothing quite so exhilarating as being shot at without result."

We weren't being shot at - not literally at least - but we all have come to understand ourselves as targets in Blair's war on traditional England.

The most impressive thing about the whole event was the immense good humour and cheerfulness. Everybody smiling. The multitudes didn't drop litter; they picked it up. And when they walked past the Cenotaph in Whitehall, they observed silence in honour of those who gave their lives for freedom in the world wars.

Contrast the smiling faces of the marchers with the scattering of anti-hunt protestors who had turned up: snarling, cowering, verminous as the predator whose cause they espouse. I was reminded of Lord Macaulay's saying: "The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. The anti-hunt brigade don't love the fox; but they harbour a virulent hatred for the sort of people who go hunting.

But the march was only partly about hunting. There was a much broader theme than the single issue of whether an ancient rural freedom should be removed by metropolitan control freaks and "modernising" totalitarians who hate everything that traditional England stands for.

It was a wider protest: against the way Blair's government mishandled the foot-and-mouth crisis, ruining thousands of farmers in the process. It was about the deliberate neglect and running-down of the countryside, the closure of shops and post offices and the lamentable lack of a decent rural transport system.

It was a cry of outrage against the Government's policy of making farmers into leisure-management consultants and turning the countryside into just one more tourism resource.

When you're marching for three hours or so, you tend to have conversations with your companions. All the conversations I had were of the same sort: they were a courteously bloody-minded celebration of a way of life that has been almost destroyed. They were a proclamation of a set of values and heartfelt sentiments that have always been cherished by decent English people.

Marchers were of that traditional sort: polite, friendly, dressed casually yet smartly. What passed through London last Sunday was the alternative society - a great 'No' to the whole world of the foul-mouthed football mob, the clubbing, drugging, fashion-obsessed, litter-scattering, trash TV watching dictatorship of the depraved proletariat.

The Countryside March was of the same character as the massive processions to pay last respects to the Queen Mother. And it was the politest of warnings to Blair.

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.