Norfolk and Suffolk: Country & Coast - Season 1

We start our celebration of Norfolk and Suffolk as the sun rises, breaking through the surf onboard one of the last of the Cromer Crab Boats. Soon we begin hauling up Norfolk's bounty, crab pots full of what skipper, Richard Mathews, hopes will be supper for 100 wedding guests at his restaurant this evening.

Inland, we spend time with another early riser, Coxy the Vegman aka Darren Cox, a trader in the Suffolk town of Sudbury. Sudbury's market can be traced back to Saxon times, so Darren is continuing a trade that's lasted well over 1,000 years.

Down on the Suffolk coast, Dani Church's Walberswick ferry crossing is a little younger. It's only been running for 700 years. Dani herself has been at the ores for over 10 years and is the fifth generation of her family to row passengers across the river Blythe.

Still in Suffolk we join champion rose grower Ian Limmer as he chases gold at the Chelsea Flower Show. Since October he's been raising over 3,000 plants for the event, and today he's deciding which will be good enough to go to Chelsea and, he hopes, win him gold for the 28th time.

Another person chasing gold is dingy sailor Keith Ferridge. Only having the use of one arm due to cerebral palsy, he's been racing an adapted dingy on Norfolk's Olton Broad for the last ten years and is soon jostling for first position at the front of the fleet. With the sun sinking low after a wonderful day experiencing the best of Norfolk and Suffolk.

As the sun rises over Sheringham beach, lifeboat man Chris Taylor dons his flippers and heads into an almost unknown world just feet from the land. An incredible 22-mile-long chalk ridge, nicknamed Norfolk's Great Barrier Reef. It's the reef that makes the North Norfolk Coast one of the best places for sea food in the country, and one of the best places to eat it is Wells-next-the-Sea, where we meet chef Scott Dougal as he picks up fresh crab for the lunch time rush.

Moored in the harbour, just outside the restaurant, is the boat Lucy Lavers. She now takes tourists on trips around the harbour but this lifeboat, built in the 1930s, can justly claim to have saved more people than any other as she is one of the last of the little ships that in 1940 helped rescue troops from the beaches of Dunkirk.

Away from the sea, we head to Suffolk to meet Poppy Drury and Joe Hanks, shepherds at Shimpling Farm, as they do their morning rounds checking on lambs born overnight. Just down the road at St Peter and St Pauls in Lavenham we join the bell ringers for their morning practice. The seven great bells were first installed 700 years ago, paid for with money from the wool trade that still goes on at farms like Shimpling.

Back in Norfolk we tee off at Gorleston Golf Club for the first big meeting of the season, the Lady's Open, before heading inland to Wroxham. Here we board the trial run for the greenest steam train in the world, the first to be powered not by coal but by one of Norfolk's great crops: oil seed rape.