His family later moved to North Cornwall, onto the Rock in the estuary of the River Camel, where he developed a love of nature and the sea.
He was educated at Gresham's School in Norfolk, where he earned a scholarship to Lincoln College, Oxford to study natural sciences.
[1] After earning a degree from Lincoln College, Hepburn taught chemistry at Oundle School in Northamptonshire for nearly four decades, 1925–64.
[3][4] An early review remarks, "This book, so clearly and unpretentiously written, so admirably illustrated, is imaginatively stimulating to a quite unusual degree.
No fringe of beach or, scrubby headland, no strip of brackish marsh, no tidal estuary can seem, when one has read it, devoid of interest.