REGIONAL FOCUS and LOCAL INTEREST GUIDES in and around NORFOLK, SUFFOLK, CAMBRIDGESHIRE, ESSEX and the NORFOLK BROADS in EAST ANGLIA UK.

Twice a month for several years, until 1996, a Dutch sailing barge, the Albatros, nosed her way along the tortuous channel into the harbour at Wells-next-the-Sea in North Norfolk. Each time, she carried soya bean meal from Ghent in Belgium for Dalgety.

The Norman conquerors had a logistical problem in the few years after the Battle of Hastings: there were only about 10,000 of them to keep the lid on a hostile nation of two million which was constantly in revolt somewhere or other. Their solution was castles to provide a base for whichever of King William's associates held that particular slice of country among his spoils...

In the days when roads were still hardly worth the name and horses dragging coal waggons - and coal was the most important cargo - through winter quagmires were the cutting edge of land-bound goods haulage, almost any waterway with enough water offered an alternative...

Now and then, in summer, on one of Norfolk's ancient commons, you might see a Gypsy waggon, small, colourful and anachronistic. A tethered horse nearby will be reducing the grass in its orbit to trampled paleness, while a dog looks out from between the wagon's wheels...

It came to a head in Essex in May, 1381. The Poll Tax funding war with France had been hiked to three groats a head, (beggars and under-fifteens excluded) and despite some loading on the wealthy, was biting hard on the peasantry. And then there was the Black Death....

Two surprises among many may strike new visitors to East Anglia. One is the fact that the landscape is not particularly flat (least of all in Norfolk - beyond The Fens anyway - despite an off-hand pen stroke by one Noel Coward). The other is that tucked into folds or perched on ridges are many churches whose towers are round.

At the end of the first millennium, Cambridgeshire had hit bad times again just when it was beginning to carve an identity. In the roller coaster of the previous few hundred years, it had been a sort of no-man's land of forest, fen and chalk ridge where control ebbed and flowed during the regional (pre-Viking) wars..

England, under one rule since Alfred's son, Edward, had unified the title in 921, was ruled by Aethelraed the Unready. But his perceived non-preparedness had persuaded a new generation of Vikings that Britain was again for the taking and since the 980s they had been trying to do just that. East Anglia was in the front line...

Not so long ago, well within living memory, the corn harvest was a different scene. In the 1950s, there were no combine harvesters to swallow up acres per hour nor round straw bales to strew the landscape (before being piled up in the face of the straw burning ban which came in the ‘90s).

Think of the great Elizabethan seafarers and explorers - Raleigh, Drake, Frobisher and the rest - and the name of the one-time Suffolk parson, Richard Hakluyt, might not come to mind. But Hakluyt was their contemporary and chronicler; perhaps even the first geographer in the modern sense of the word...

By 1942, the Second World War in Europe had reached a turning point, and the future had to be declared with intent. The attack on Pearl Harbour, had officially brought the United States of America into the conflict...

There was one defining moment in modern history, when the British and American peoples were at their closest. This was during the wartime years, between 1941-45. Britain has never been invaded, since the Normans came in 1066, but those final four years of World War II saw an 'invasion' by the men and women of the American armed services.

Surprisingly perhaps, East Anglia, now the most sparsely populated region of England, was once the most densely populated, the country’s industrial heart, the engine of foreign trade. For a few hundred years from the Norman invasion of 1066, it was rich enough periodically to bequeath an architectural legacy which still shows how good things probably were....