IT'S A SMALL PLACE, and a neighbourly one, and I found it quite by accident - just the kind of combination, perhaps, calculated to win one's heart. The maps of East Anglia are full of tantalising echoes of such corners. Every day you drive past the dried-out fields alongside Fen Lanes, past the empty, private spaces (or, now, uncompromisingly developed ones) of Low Commons, and wonder how rowdy and rich and communal this region must have been two centuries ago. But this little Marsh, marked as such on the Ordnance Survey, is still there. Just four acres of perfectly dank and tangled meadowland, unfussy, unclaimed, unmanaged, and scattered with ponds and dykes. There was a little Ranters' settlement here in the nineteenth century, and I like to think they added their extravagant, festive aura to the liveliness of the place.

For the whole of the growing season, its damp, tremulous membrane of living tissue recapitulates the pendulum swings of ancient ecosystems: wood to wetland, shade to light; from the musky sheets of moschatel in the early spring, through the vivid flowers of the first clearings - cowslip and marsh orchid and forget-me-not - to the almost-woodland-again sheaves of meadowsweet and codlins and cream in high summer. And if you don't feel philosophical you can simply sit and relish the scent of water-mint and the snap of hawking swallows' bills.

Or you can if you're feeling right, attuned. There is no such thing as a favourite place if you are not, in that vivid, present moment, one of nature's favourite persons. Our sensuous, imaginative relishing of a place, which is partly conscious but partly beyond our individual choice, is the way we engage ecologically with nature, and a place cannot be wholly separate from our experience of it. So I would say that my favourite spot, at present, is me on fine-tuned day with Wortham Marsh.

by Richard Mabey