On top of the Butter Cross, in the middle of the market place, stands a lead figure of Justice, added in 1754 to an octagonal domed shelter that was already sixty-five years old. The shelter itself went up in 1689, the year after the fire that took most of the town, and it has had a busier life than its dignity suggests. A prisoner's cage stood beneath it until 1836. When the surrounding steps were taken away in 1867 the workmen found an old dungeon underneath. On Thursdays a market still gathers around it, as markets have gathered in Bungay since the Middle Ages, and several provisions are available nearby.
That is the shape of the place: a compact grid of streets on sloping ground, almost surrounded by a loop of the River Waveney, with water meadows below that flood in winter and hold cattle by summer.
The eating is concentrated in a compact cluster around Earsham Street. Earsham Street Fish Co is run by Cliffy, a fishmonger of nearly fifty years, whose counter can carry up to sixty varieties of fresh and smoked fish and shellfish. A few doors along, Palfrey & Hall is the butcher, turning East Anglian beef, free-range pork, lamb and local chicken into bacon, ham, savouries and its own-recipe pork pies. Giddens & Thompson keeps the greengrocery — seasonal produce, veg boxes, herbs and the less common ingredients — and sits within sight of the deli, the bakery and the fishmonger, a food cluster that has arranged itself along one short stretch of pavement. Earsham Street Delicatessen has been there since 2007, leaning on small and local producers, and Imperial Wine handles the drink, with an emphasis on small growers from East Anglia and the Waveney Valley, and tastings to go with them.
For bread, BAKED on Earsham Street is the shopfront: Yasmin, Fern and Lucy make everything from scratch with free-range eggs, real butter and Belgian chocolate, and turn out viennoiserie, brownies, sausage rolls, cookies and celebration cakes, with coffee to sit over. On Thursdays the market brings Pete the Baker, whose sourdough and yeasted breads use mostly local organic flour, including Hodmedod grain, and run to olive focaccia, fougasse, parkin and Chelsea buns. He will sell you a sourdough starter as well.
The sit-down food is broad for a town this size. Fiano cooks a Mediterranean menu of antipasti, pasta, meat and fish, with dishes such as Gamberoni alla Diavola, grilled goat's cheese with courgettes, and its own tiramisu. Suffolk Stonehouse makes its dough daily, proves it in a Georgian cellar and stone-bakes it at 300 degrees; its pizzas are named for the country around the town, so the Flixton comes with Baron Bigod brie, Parma ham and red-onion jam, and there are others called Outney Common, Waveney and North Sea. Earsham Street Café works out of a seventeenth-century building, doing meals, cakes and scones you can also order whole. The Old Bank Tearooms leans into three-tier afternoon teas in a wood-panelled room. If you want coffee taken seriously, The Silo roasts single-origin beans on site under Amir Montazer, a World Coffee Judge who runs courses there. Beside the castle, Bigod's Kitchen does breakfast, cakes and cooked dishes from canvas-covered seating, the setting doing most of the work.
There are four pubs, and they divide cleanly. The Green Dragon on Broad Street brews its own beer in outbuildings behind the bar — four regulars, Bridge Street Bitter at 4.5%, Chaucer Ale, Gold and Strong Mild, plus a changing guest. Brothers Robert and William Pickard started the brewery in 1991, when the old Horse & Groom took the Green Dragon name. The interior is worth a look before you order: a quarry-tiled public bar, 1930s counters, bar-backs and fireplaces, judged nationally important enough to keep. Chef Scott cooks made-to-order pub food, tikka bites and burgers among it, and there is a standing tradition of oysters and jazz, the oysters supplied by the Earsham Street fishmonger.
The Fleece Inn, on St Mary's Street, is a strong choice for a proper meal. The building predates 1500 — it was the Cross Keys until it became the Fleece by 1711 — and behind its low ceilings and beams there is a bar, a restaurant, an upstairs dining room and a rear courtyard. The kitchen cooks seasonal food with an international lean, buying wild boar, venison and goat from Maisebrooke, fish from Scaled Up and the Earsham Street counter, ice cream from Alburgh, and making its own puddings and Sunday roasts. Diners have come away from butternut-squash risotto, pork-belly cassoulet, roast cod loin, apple samosa and a chocolate-orange bread-and-butter pudding. One recent visitor called it "warm, relaxed and inviting."
The Chequers on Bridge Street is the plain town local, a two-room seventeenth-century pub divided by an arch, with a paved beer garden reached through a covered passage, local real ale and a welcome for dogs. The Three Tuns on Earsham Street is a former coaching inn with a single large bar around a fireplace and a cellar function room whose walls are said to hold stone from the castle. It carries the town's ghost trade as well: it is promoted as Britain's most haunted pub, with more than twenty spirits attached to it, and a clergyman was reportedly asked to exorcise it in 1969. When the comedian Mark Steel visited in 2011, he could not find a single local who had actually seen one.
The castle those cellar stones supposedly came from is nearby, and it organises the whole town without appearing to. Hugh Bigod raised the stone keep here in the 1160s and 70s, and when he joined the revolt of 1173, Henry II laid siege; the tunnel his sappers dug to bring the keep down still opens at its south-west corner. By 1382 a survey called the place "old and ruinous and worth nothing a year." A local man quarried its masonry for road stone after 1766, and in 1792 it passed to the Bonhote family, whose Elizabeth turned the ruin into a two-volume novel. The townspeople were given it outright in 1987. Look at the streets around it and you can read the old defences in the property lines, houses still curving along the course of the outer ditch.
Uphill from the market place, St Mary's is the larger of the two great churches, its 33.5-metre tower begun around 1470 and rebuilt after the 1688 fire. It is no longer used for worship, but you can usually go in to see the carved roof bosses — angels, a lion, two-headed eagles and, among them, a bat — and a wooden dole cupboard of 1675 carved with religious figures and a rat. A Flemish Resurrection panel was given by the novelist Rider Haggard. St Mary's is the church of the town's most famous story: during a violent storm on 4 August 1577, a black hellhound was said to have run the length of the building. The churchwardens' accounts record, more soberly, that two men died in the belfry that day. The town holds a Black Shuck Festival each August, revived in 2022.
Holy Trinity, downhill and still the working parish church, is quieter and older in its bones, its round tower dated to about 1041. Inside there is a hexagonal Elizabethan pulpit of 1588, bought for ten shillings, and a set of altar rails from around 1660 whose balusters are set unusually close; the spacing was meant to keep dogs out of the sanctuary. A plaque by the door reads "Here the Fire was Stayed 1688," which is exactly what it did — the church stood at the edge of the fire that gutted the rest of the town.
That fire, in March 1688, is the hinge of everything you see. It destroyed St Mary's, the grammar school and much of the market place, and the Georgian rebuilding that followed was smart enough that the prospering town picked up the nickname "Little London." The Fisher Theatre belongs to that later confidence: David Fisher opened it on 28 February 1828 with a performance of The Belle's Stratagem, one of thirteen theatres he built across Norfolk and Suffolk. It spent the century and a half after his family sold it as a corn hall, a cinema, a steam laundry and a textile warehouse, before a local society bought it back and reopened it as an arts centre in 2006. The museum a few steps away was started in 1963 by Lilias Rider Haggard, the novelist's daughter. Long before any of it, Domesday recorded 215 households here, which put the place among the larger settlements the survey recorded.
For all its streets, the reason to keep coming back to Bungay is the water and the common at its edge. Outney Common is some four hundred acres of grazing land almost ringed by the Waveney, the low ground kept for cattle and the higher "Hards" given over to an eighteen-hole golf course that shares its turf with anyone crossing on foot. The Broads Authority's canoe loop runs about four miles around the common in roughly three hours, with boats to hire from Outney Meadow. There is a good spread of walking, too. Bigod's Way is a ten-mile circle with the castle at its centre. The Bath Hills circuit of five and a half miles takes in the ground where an apothecary named John King built a cold-bath resort in the 1730s. The short Rabbitskin Run of two and a half miles is named for George Baldry, a local character, and his book The Rabbitskin Cap. When ten miles is too much, the two-part Town Trail links the old buildings, churches and river in under two hours a loop.
The town keeps no railway of its own; passengers last used Bungay station in 1953. Most people arrive by the A143, which now bypasses the old streets, or the A144 south toward Halesworth, and the buses are useful without being frequent: the 580 runs to Beccles and Great Yarmouth, and the 81 goes to Diss in one direction and Beccles in the other, calling at Earsham on the way. Timetables on both routes are worth checking before you travel. Beccles, about 6.2 miles off by road, is the nearest station, and worth an afternoon of its own for the quay and the river-cliff old town.
One last thing, easy to walk past. In the 1890s a man named Frederick Smith laid cork bricks in a passage near his house to soften the noise of horses passing the window, because his wife, Katherine, was ill and could not bear the sound. The paving was rediscovered in the 1970s, and one of the bricks now sits in the museum, a few doors from where he laid it.