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Seventy five years ago, a Norfolk physician, Dr Sydney Herbert Long, with a practice in Norwich and a passion for nature, put into effect a plan which, although he probably didn't realise it at the time, would set a pattern for wildlife protection across the whole country. He instigated the foundation of the Norfolk Naturalist's Trust which later became the Norfolk Wildlife Trust (NWT).

It was the old question of the right person at the right time. Born the son of a doctor (and amateur botanist) in Wells-next-the-Sea, he grew up with a knowledge and love of the coastal marshes. Later, with a practice in Surrey Street and work at both the Norfolk and Norwich hospital and the Jenny Lind, he was moving among - and probably operating on - the Great and the Good. By then, he was also a man of zeal, campaigning for, among other things, nurses' rights. And he happened to be secretary of the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists Society.

The point of conception for today's NWT was the offering for sale of 407 acres (165 hectares) of Cley Marshes. Sydney Long had for some time been concerned about the intensity of shooting there and saw, in the chance to buy the marshes, a chance also to control their use. But his own naturalists' society, the Norfolk and Norwich, was precluded by its memorandum of association from owning land, and so he set about persuading his friends and aquaintances to cough up enough cash to buy the land between them.

And, clearly, he could be very persuasive, particularly perhaps when he had moneyed patients on the cutting slab. For bear in mind that these were difficult times. Industrial decline was about to spawn the 1926 National Strike which, even if that didn't much hurt the middle classes of relatively non-industrial Norfolk, it might still have sown doubts among potential contributors. It was also early days for wildlife preservation. The National Trust had been around for a while but the RSPB had only just come into being and there were only two or three designated bird reserves in the whole country. There were certainly no land-owning wildlife trusts as such.

But, from a dozen or so subscribers, he still managed to raise the then collossal sum of £5,160 - around half a million in today's money - and the purchase was completed on March 6th 1926.

A week later, the new owners met at the George Hotel in Cley and formerly agreed that the land be transferred to a new trust on condition that it also be held in perpetuity as a bird sanctuary.

That new body, the Norfolk Naturalists Trust, held its formative meeting the following November and the rest is more or less history. Even though other counties took a while to catch on, (the next trust - Yorkshire's - wasn't formed for another 25 years and most of the rest were created in the '50s and '60s) there are 46 wildlife trusts in the UK today, between them managing nearly 2,500 nature reserves.

The NWT, one of the largest, has over 17,000 members, a staff of 40 staff and more than 1000 active volunteers. It has 40 natures reserves - eight with National Nature Reserve status, the highest national designation - covering more than 2,600 hectares in total, and owns 10km of coastline, six ancient woodlands and nine Norfolk Broads including two of the largest, Barton and Hickling.

It was acquisitive from the outset. The second purchase - of 10.5 hectares of marsh at Martham - was made in 1928 and the third, of Alderfen Broad, in 1930 which was the year that the Trust produced its first Christmas card, thought to be the first charity Christmas card in the country, which carried a picture of a bearded tit by J C Harrison.

One of the 1932 cards, which had a picture of a goldfinch, was sent to King George V whose secretary replied from Sandringham:

'The King is pleased to accept the Christmas Card of a goldfinch produced by Mr JC Harris which his majesty much admires. I am commanded to convey to you his sincere thanks. His Majesty is gratified to learn that the sale of the card has resulted in the bank overdraft of the Norfolk Naturalist's Trust being extinguished.

Yours faithfully,

A Hardy.

Not only was the Trust breaking ground on wildlife protection, but its funding techniques were obviously pushing new frontiers, too.

And the land acquisitions continued with East Wretham reserve including Longmere and Ringmere in 1940 followed by 121 hectares (300 acres) of Weeting Heath in 1942 and 290 hectares (715 acres) at Hickling, where another 202 hectares were leased, in 1945.

Sydney Long did not live to see these; he died in 1939 at the age of 69. But his brainchild by then had its own momentum and has continued to grow and evolve ever since. Land holdings have built up steadily, not only through purchase but through straight donation, sometimes of substantial chunks of land and water, such as East Winch Common (32 hectares) and Ranworth and Cockshoot Broads, the latter two given to the Trust by Col H J Cator in 1949.

But the whole science of wildlife conservation has also evolved during the Trust's lifetime, going essentially from passive observation to active involvement in the preservation and management of habitats, as NWT Director, Brendan Joyce, explains.

Back at the beginning, a wildlife reserve was seen as a place to be fenced off with the wildlife being left largely to its own devices. That approach held sway for quite a long time. Then in the '60s and '70s, pollution was seen as a major threat while in the '80s and '90s, neglect was a problem - and a problem of course stemming partly from the original approach of passive seclusion.

'By then, it had long been clear that a nature reserve should be anything but a place with a fence around it. These days, nature conservation is a business in that the NWT - and all wildlife trusts for that matter -welcomes visitors to the reserves. Indeed, under the pressures of life in a crowded island like the UK, we simply cannot protect rarer species without being very active. We certainly cannot merely sit by and watch change.'

So direct and concentrated involvement is the key, particularly in a county like Norfolk where some of the more distinctive and valuable habitats were actually man-made in the first place through activities which are now much reduced or no longer take place. Broadland's marshes are an example. There, the demise of traditional products like marsh litter and fodder for the horses which once pulled the nation's carriages, together with a major reduction in sedge and reed cropping in the face of cheap imports (particularly of reed), have caused large tracts of habitat to revert to scrub and ultimately woodland.

These can be restored and maintained by traditional cropping but that is labour intensive, even with modern mechanisation, and the product often only contributes to - rather than covers - the cost. The Trust does use a 'flying flock', a collection of shetland, black welsh mountain, hebridean and herdwick ewes, which graze closely and keep the marshes free of invasive species but it still spends at least £1million a year on the restoration of nature reserves. In 1999, it began a five year, £3.3million nature reserve restoration plan, 'Securing the Future', with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Various events are arranged for this anniversary year including a weekend of celebration at Cley Marshes, the place that started it all, on 24th and 25th of March. Those marshes indeed now have a double signifance, for, having been flooded to a depth of 12 feet in the 1953 flood and now under threat from rising sea levels, they are themselves the subject of some direct and concentrated involvement which shortly will extend well beyond the regular - and commercial - cutting of reed.

At present protected from the sea only by a shingle bank, which has for some years been artificially maintained by bulldozing and is therefore inherently unstable, the marshes are generally reckoned to be undefendable to their present extent against rising sea levels. There have been several major inundations since 1953, the last serious one in 1996. So a new line of defence in the form of a parallel clay bank is to be built to protect most of the freshwater habitat and reed beds. The shingle bank will then be left to its fate which is expected to be to adopt a lower and more natural profile, absorbing wave energy and acting as a buffer for the new defence while allowing enrichment of the saline habitat already forming immediately on its landward side.

Sydney Long might have thought such a proposal a touch radical. After all, his original idea was to leave the marshes undisturbed for the birds. But then he was more than a touch radical himself and with today's knowedge and experience, he would have seen that undisturbed by man does not mean unchanged by nature. As someone with an eye to the long term, he would have doubtless approved.