Yet, despite the wealth of wildlife in the Broads, this most natural-seeming setting hasn't always been like it is today. Shallow seas once ebbed and flowed around the ground where you are standing, depositing the soils that now lie deep beneath your feet. Sea levels, as well as the climate, fluctuated over millennia until, around 8,500 years ago – a mere moment in geological terms – Britain became the island it is today. Even then, the landscape of the Broads would have been unrecognisable – a vast estuary stretching inland from where present-day Great Yarmouth is sited.
From the early Stone Age, people too have come and gone with the changing conditions, to hunt and fish among the area's wetlands and estuaries, before Neolithic settlers began to graze their animals and make more-permanent homes here, around 2500 BC.
Later came the Romans – who built two great coastal forts at Caister-on-Sea and Burgh Castle – followed several hundred years later by more colonists from across the sea, the Saxons and the Vikings. This new period of human history was to have a lasting effect on the landscape of the Broads, as during medieval times the digging-out of peat for fuel led to the creation of the fifty or so shallow lakes, or ‘Broads’, which are so familiar today.