Under the eastern sky

In our series on the history of sporting counties, Richard Negus looks at East Anglia

- Richard Negus

Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire and the northern part of Essex, known collectively as East Anglia, boasts a sporting pedigree as wild and diverse as its people. It is no idle swank to say that much of the sport enjoyed today in England was either invented, first recorded or formalised here in the east. This is the home of the Jockey Club and Swaffham Coursing Club. The notably picky red-legged partridge decided, (with a little help from the Marquis of Hertford) that Suffolk was just the place to be. This is the birthplace of driven pheasant shooting and ancestral home of the punt-gun.

Izaak Walton fished our waters and wrote a masterpiece about it; other sporting literary greats followed in his wake. John Humphreys, Allan Savory and James Wentworth Day penned images of East Anglian wild sport. Henry Williamson escaped notoriety in Devon to farm and fulminate at Stiffkey. Roger Deakin, Sir Peter Scott and Helen Macdonald wrote wonders here about matters diverse.

The French word 'terroir' infers that a region imbues its people, animals and food, the very soil and air with a uniqueness. In essence, the place makes the man. East Anglia's terroir has made many of Shooting Times' current crop, including Ed Coles, Simon Garnham and myself, so make of that what you will.

The region's western reaches play home to the dark soils of the peat fen. Here, vast acres of agriculture rub shoulders with ancient washes and oozing meres. The sweeping wetlands of the Ouse Washes, while on the surface appear tamed by man, in truth are a place on the edge. One super high tide or pump switch failure could see black earth become liquid once more, returning it to a place of water and reed, waders and wildfowl. Members of the Ely and Fenland Wildfowling Clubs are the 'Fen Tigers' of today, the modern incarnation of Wentworth Day's Rum Owd Boys.