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Matt Baker is at the beautiful Cambridge University Botanic Gardens to find out more about John Henslow, a mentor to Charles Darwin and an eminent scholar at Cambridge.  Matt gets up close to some of the specimens that Darwin sent back to his tutor from on board the Beagle. Hundreds of years on and Cambridge is still doing pioneering work in plant science. Matt meets with a modern day tutor and his protégé as they go about their fascinating work.

The Great Fen in Cambridgeshire is undergoing massive restoration thanks to the hard work of staff and volunteers of the local Wildlife Trust. Much of the area that used to be farmland has now been turned back into wetland again. We meet Kevan Wolstencroft, an avid birdwatcher, as he discovers the species that are thriving as a result of the transformation. 

Christmas is not that far away but for some farmers it is on their minds all year around. Adam Henson travels down to Essex to meet turkey farmer Paul Kelly and see how this year’s preparations are coming along. Adam also drops in on former boyband member JB who is now a farmer. He is rearing a few of these seasonal birds on his own farm down in Kent. JB has also started farming an historic breed of pig, but there’s bad news about the chickens that Adam started him off with last year. 

Cambridge University conjures up images of students burying their heads in mountains of books.  However somestudents do have the opportunity to get their hands dirty, down on the purpose-built University Farm. Matt gets to grips with some of their high-tech equipment which gives him an opportunity to see the livestock from a rather unusual angle!

As the Great Fen is restored to wetland, there is a pressing need to salvage the wreckage of a Spitfire which crashed here 75 years ago. Joe Crowley joins a team of ex-service men and women as they work alongside professional archaeologists to recover Pilot Officer Harold Penketh’s plane. His Spitfire wasn’t brought down in battle, instead it crashed during a training flight in November 1940. It serves as a poignant reminder of the many tragic losses of World War II, but the dig also offers veterans from more recent conflict a chance to work together and deal with some of the issues they have faced since leaving the forces. 

Wales is a country of more than eight thousand square miles, but only about a quarter is designated ‘open land’ – areas where people are free to walk and ramble. Now the Welsh Government is looking at ways that legal access to land could be reformed, including proposals for Scottish-style open access. However, as Tom Heap finds out, although organisations like Ramblers Cymru support opening up the countryside, others – including many landowners – are concerned about the impact it could have.  

With all the studying that’s going on, students at Cambridge need to be able to let their hair down - and where better to do that than in the Cambridgeshire countryside? Matt joins the university’s cross-country runners, the Hare and Hounds, as they train for the hotly contested Varsity Match – in which Cambridge and Oxford go head to head to find out which one is the fastest.