Filby

Clear Water and Broadside Dining

The water at Filby Broad is unusually clear, and the reason is a technicality: the Trinity Broads, the five lakes strung along the edge of the village, are cut off from the main navigation network, helping preserve the clear water. A boardwalk crosses the Broad side of the A1064, and a footpath from the car park leads to a bird hide over Ormesby Little Broad. In winter the water holds coot, goldeneye and shoveler; otters and water voles live in the reedbeds, and the list of raptors recorded here runs to marsh harrier, hobby, peregrine, osprey and white-tailed eagle.

Filby Bridge Restaurant has stood at the water's edge for more than thirty years, family-run, with a licensed bar and a patio looking out over Filby and Ormesby Little Broads. The pastry and the tartare sauce are made in-house. The lunch menu runs from chicken-liver pâté and a smoked mackerel fillet through a shortcrust pie of the day and a suet pudding of the day to a butcher's beef burger with cheese and bacon, and finishes with homemade cheesecake or a knickerbocker glory. You can hire a two-person rowing boat here and fish the Broad.

Pub Life and a Village in Bloom

The King's Head, on Main Road, is the village pub: home-cooked food, a good-sized beer garden, real ales, and live sport and music when they are on. There is a Post Office and village shop on Main Road as well.

Filby takes its planting seriously. Nearly two miles of hanging baskets, tubs and garden displays thread through the village, with the heaviest beds at the top of Pound Lane, and in 2025 Filby in Bloom won RHS Gold and the Village & Large Village category at the Britain in Bloom UK finals. Behind the show is a new wildflower meadow supporting a hundred species of moth and eleven of bat, and a mindful wildlife garden beside the community orchard with a giant bug hotel, a stumpery, a pond and edible raspberries. Bob, one of the volunteers, described its purpose as "for the community, education, mindfulness and nature."

Medieval Craft and Filby's Past

All Saints is medieval, mostly fourteenth-century, built of flint and chert with limestone dressings and a nave that is still thatched. Inside is a painted rood screen of about 1450, one of the few pre-Reformation screens to survive; it is reckoned second only to Ranworth's, the two attributed to the same school of Norfolk craftsmen. There is a recut thirteenth-century Purbeck-marble font and a polygonal pulpit from the early sixteenth century.

The village is old. Domesday found it under six landholders in the hundred of East Flegg, with meadow, salthouses and no woodland at all, already among the larger settlements the surveyors recorded. The war memorial on the green was unveiled by Mrs C. B. Lucas on 23 November 1919 and carries thirteen names from the First World War.

Wildlife Gardens and Connections

Next door in Thrigby, Thrigby Hall Wildlife Gardens keeps Asian animals — tigers, snow leopards, red pandas, gibbons — with elevated walkways that run through the treetops above the enclosures. Great Yarmouth and its beaches are about six miles east; Norwich is sixteen miles the other way. Filby sits on the A1064, with the route 7 bus calling at Thrigby Road roughly every two hours and trains at Acle.

Reserve Access and Young Beekeepers

The reserve paths are access grade 1 and the car park has toilets, though only assistance dogs get past the gate. Some of the busiest residents are children: the Filbee Beekeepers' Bee Club is teaching Max, thirteen, and Theo, eight, under Ray and Anette Hurt, and each of their hives turns out around sixty pounds of surplus honey a year, sold in the village shop.