East Anglia is a distinct region and has been considered so for over a millennium. This is how one tenth-century writer, Abbo of Fleury, saw it:

For Abbo, East Anglia was a peninsula, separate from yet also joined to the rest of England. Much later, in the 1980s, the author Malcolm Bradbury would unwittingly reiterate this when he quipped that East Anglia was cut off by the North Sea on three sides and British Rail on the fourth. Evidently, the region may be defined clearly and conveniently by its landscape, understood as a conjunction of the natural and the manmade.

For quite some time now, archaeologists, geographers, historians, art historians and other scholars have understood that landscapes are simultaneously geographical and cultural. That is certainly a sensible way of seeing the East Anglian landscape, where fishing, farming, peat digging, reed harvesting, land drainage, wharf building and a multitude of other human activities have been undertaken across many centuries.