Geldeston

The Lock, the Inn and the River

The Locks Inn sits at the end of a long track off Station Road, at the point where the River Waveney stops being navigable. You can walk to it or arrive by boat, and either way it feels a good distance from anywhere. The building was the lock-keeper's home. The lock itself worked from around 1670 until 1934, part of a set of Waveney locks built to keep the channel deep enough for cargo boats going up to Bungay, and the inn held a beer licence by 1768.

In 2020 it was threatened with auction. The village bought it, turned it into a Community Benefit Society, and it now counts almost 1,600 shareholder-members. "Saving the Locks Inn has been an amazing feat in unprecedented times," said Graham Elliott, who chaired the group behind the share offer. It serves food and ales from local breweries, hosts music, and welcomes friendly dogs on leads.

Village Provisions and the Wherry

Back in the village proper, the Wherry Inn is a small red-brick, pantiled pub run by Janet Carr and John Warner. It has open fires in winter, a courtyard and a beer garden, and takes families and dogs. The kitchen has run to dishes such as Adnams beer-battered fish and chips, honey-roast ham with egg and chips, a halloumi burger and a plant-based Moving Mountains burger, with seasonal Adnams beers on — worth checking the board on the day. The pub is the only surviving part of one of the two great eighteenth-century maltings complexes that once stood here, with a brewery behind it. Bus 81 stops outside, running Monday to Saturday towards Beccles one way and Bungay, Harleston and Diss the other; the pub's own sign still says 60, so check the timetable before relying on it.

For provisions there is Mandy's Farm Shop at Dunburgh Farm on The Street, which sells chutneys, jams and marmalades under the Mandy's Famous Pickles name and does afternoon teas.

From Water Meadows to Higher Ground

The old village is worth walking slowly; the staithe and Big Row are its best small spaces. A seven-mile circular from Beccles follows the Norfolk bank of the Waveney for a mile and a half, comes into Geldeston, carries on to the Locks Inn, then crosses bridges and marsh and returns by Roos Hall and Puddingmoor, past water meadows, Geldeston Dyke and the Beccles bell tower. Expect stiles and field edges as well as riverbank. If you would rather be on the water, Rowan Craft's marina hires out motor day-boats and canoes.

St Michael and All Angels stands above the modern village, on the higher ground where the medieval settlement began. Its round west tower is twelfth-century; inside there is an octagonal font carved with lions around the stem and alternating roses and shields around the bowl, and a scissor-braced roof over the nave.

Trade Lost, History Found

Geldeston is unusually screened by trees, and the water trade that built it has been gone a long time: the brewery closed in 1858, one maltings closed by 1914 and was demolished in 1922, the other lasted into the 1930s, and navigation rights above the village were withdrawn in 1934. What is left is quiet.

There is more history in the ground than in the buildings. A Palaeolithic flint axe was found opposite the Wherry, and Bronze Age metalwork turned up when Geldeston Hall was being built in 1777. Nearer our own time, the family of the crystallographer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin made its English home here in 1920.

The Street to the Meadows

Along The Street, the Old House's long crinkle-crankle wall curves with the road instead of wrapping a garden, a roadside boundary where you would expect a plain one. Beyond it the ground slopes down to the meadows and the river, and on a warm evening it feels like most of the village's movement is people walking out to the lock and back.