The village runs along the River Waveney, a little over two miles north-east of Bungay, its built-up part joining Kirby Cane so evenly that you cross from one parish to the other without noticing. At the water's edge sits Ellingham Mill, an 18th-century weatherboarded watermill above a rendered brick ground floor, standing on an artificial semicircular cut dug so it could keep a head of water while the lock beside it controlled the Bungay Navigation. Grain and flour once left here by wherry as well as by road.
For dinner you have The Olive Tree, at 28 Yarmouth Road, a family-run Italian restaurant with a Neapolitan lean. The kitchen turns out homemade gnocchi alla Sorrentina, spaghetti alla Gamberoni, sea bream all'acqua pazza, saltimbocca alla Romana and torta Caprese, along with a Vesuvio pizza. There is no cask ale and drink is served with food; this is a place you come to eat. The building was the Bird in Hand, an inn recorded here from 1758, until Rafe and Gail Giorgio relaunched it under its present name in 1999.
Day-to-day needs are met just over in Kirby Cane, where the Post Office and village stores on Mill Road handle the mail, cash withdrawal and deposit, and bill payments.
The pub to make an afternoon of is The Locks Inn, a short way over the parish boundary at Geldeston, at the head of navigation on the Waveney. When it was threatened with auction in 2020, close to 1,600 people bought shares, and it is now community-owned. There are large riverside gardens, overnight moorings and a canoe pontoon, up to four real ales mostly from Green Jack Brewery, and dogs on leads are welcome. You can walk to it from Beccles in about 45 minutes along the Angles Way.
That is one of several walks. A 5.5-mile circuit links Ditchingham and Ellingham across the Waveney-side mix of woodland, farmland, marsh and heath.
The Church of St Mary is Grade I listed and largely medieval, with a square 14th-century west tower and 15th-century porch and aisle windows in flint and limestone. Inside there is an octagonal 15th-century font carved with shields and roses, pine box pews, sedilia and piscina, and a shaft in the arcading carved with a bishop's head and staff. A good 16th-century monument is thought to be to John Hammond.
The river has long set the terms here. In 1444 around four hundred people from the Bungay area came and pulled down Ellingham's sluices, which were interfering with the fulling mill at Wainford; an Act of 1670 later authorised the locks at Geldeston, Shipmeadow, Ellingham and Wainford that made the navigation work. The old Bird in Hand kept the rougher entertainments — darts, cribbage, whist, a tug-of-war team, and in 1833 a four-round bare-knuckle fight in which Laurence Girling died and William Pitchers, tried for manslaughter, was fined a shilling and let go.
Ellingham had its own station from 1863, when the Waveney Valley Railway reached Beccles; passenger trains stopped in 1953 and the station is now a house. Beccles, four miles off, is the nearest railway today, and the A143 runs west to Bungay and east towards Great Yarmouth. Beccles has a quay, boat trips and a heated 30-metre outdoor lido; Bungay, closer, keeps its Georgian streets, independent shops and a museum of finds from the castle.
Milling ceased at Ellingham Mill in 1964. Since then the building has belonged to painters: Chester Williams made it a modern-art centre in the 1970s, and Margaret Thomas lived and worked there from 1984 until she died in 2016, not far short of a hundred.