Cambridgeshire covers an area of over 500,000 acres most of which is good, not to say rich, agricultural farmland. Surprisingly, the county borders as many as eight others, in clockwise order: Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Huntingdonshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire. At its northernmost point (Wisbech) it is only five miles from the sea, and the River Nene is tidal for a way into Cambridgeshire, yet for all that the lack of coastline is very significant since it restricts both the number of species recorded in the county and the occurrences of those marine birds that wander inland. It is easy to divide the county into north (fenland) and south (chalk and boulder clay) by topography and it is within these divisions, plus suburbia, that the county is described below.

FENLAND

The northern part of the county includes what remains of the vast watery fen that Vermuyden succeeded in draining. It is a flat, somewhat desolate landscape, short on trees and rich in agricultural production, celery, potatoes, carrots and beans are grown in plenty on the black peaty soils. Many a visitor finds the fenland unprepossessing and featureless but to the native and the ornithologist it is an area of immense possibilities. Ever since the Romans came various attempts had been made to drain the marshland which stretched from Waterbeach in the south through to Lincolnshire in the north and Suffolk in the east (see Fig. 1).