Aldeby

Norman craftsmanship in a scattered village

The west doorway of St Mary's is Norman: three orders of shafts, volute capitals, and mouldings cut in roll, zigzag and scallop. The fabric otherwise runs from the twelfth century into the fourteenth, built of flint, brick and limestone. The north porch, added in the 1300s, has knapped flint and flushwork panels; the square crossing tower carries an embattled, flushwork-panelled parapet and a polygonal brick stair turret. Step inside and there is a piscina and stepped sedilia, a squint, monuments to the Carpenter family, seventeenth-century Trott floor slabs, and an octagonal font carved with alternating roses and shields on eight shafts.

Aldeby spreads out rather than gathers. A cluster of houses sits along St Mary's Road, and the rest of the parish is farms and cottages scattered across higher arable fields that fall south to the River Waveney, with Suffolk on the opposite bank. Beccles is about five miles off by minor road, and no A-road runs through. Aldeby has no pub of its own, and no shop. A lane called Dun Cow Road is marked by local walkers as the site of a lost one, though what it was, and when it closed, has gone unrecorded.

Field paths to the Waveney

What the village offers instead is the walking. A five-mile route sets out from St Mary's along field paths and a belt of woodland, drops onto the unsurfaced Common Lane, passes the fishing lakes on a permissive path, and reaches the Waveney, following the bank before turning home by Priory Lane, Lily Lane and Wheatacre. A 2.7-mile version cuts back early from Priory Lane. The best of it is the descent along The Walks, where, as the local ramblers put it, "the falling terrain gives a fine view over Aldeby and the Waveney Valley." Cyclists can pick up an eleven-to-fifteen-mile circuit through Toft Monks and Wheatacre, with an optional walk to the river near Aldeby Hall.

Nearby food and a pint

For food and a pint you go out of the parish. The Swan Inn at Barnby is a family-run country pub and seafood restaurant whose menu changes with what comes in: tempura monkfish tails with garlic aioli, a fish pie with peas, grilled lemon sole in a cheese-and-prawn sauce, pan-fried chicken with Stilton and leek, and a fruits-de-mer board to share. One guest, George Browne, left it three plain words: "Very good for fish." At Toft Monks the White Lion, known locally as the Toft Lion, is the village-local sort — beamed, exposed brick, board games by the fire, home cooking and a welcome that extends readily to dogs.

Priory traces beside St Mary's

The church once stood beside a Benedictine cell, a small priory dependent on Norwich Cathedral, founded around 1100 for a prior and three monks and dissolved in 1538. The monks probably officiated in St Mary's. Priory Farmhouse survives nearby, a later brick-and-flint house dated 1719 on iron tie rods and reported to incorporate priory fabric. In 1935, when a lawn was laid out beside it, workmen turned up skulls, which the Norwich museum dated to the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

The railway Aldeby lost

Aldeby had its own railway station from 1854 until the passenger trains stopped in 1959. The station house is somebody's home now, and the old railway bridge still stands on Station Road.