The south doorway of St Mary's is carved with scallop, roll, zigzag and chip patterns, exceptionally elaborate Romanesque work. Its iron doorwork is early, its round west tower probably late eleventh century, finished at the top with a fifteenth-century parapet of chequered flint flushwork. Inside there is a font ringed with angels, the four Evangelists and four lions, a fragment of a fourteenth-century St Christopher on the wall, a double piscina, and a 1671 monument to a rector named C. Ashby. The church is Grade I and open daily. Its condition is listed as poor, and the roof has given trouble for a long time. "Haddiscoe is a beautiful and interesting church," the rector wrote to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in 1907. "The roof is in a very bad state."
The village sits on higher ground at the edge of the marsh. Its northern half, Haddiscoe Island, is nearly all grazing marsh, held inside a loop of the River Yare, the River Waveney and the dead-straight New Cut, which was dug to carry a Lowestoft-to-Norwich navigation and opened in 1833. From the village you look out across Haddiscoe Marshes and the Waveney valley.
Both of the village's old pubs are shut. The Crown, whose licence records reach back to 1789, has gone to housing; the Haddiscoe Tavern, once the Pampas Lodge and before that a run of other names, closed from 2020. For a shop, follow the B1136 toward Thorpe-next-Haddiscoe to Hillfield Nursery, a family-run farm shop and pick-your-own set across thirty acres. The shelves carry its own fruit and vegetables, honey, local eggs, frozen meat and game, Yare Valley oils, Mandy's pickles and chutneys, and somewhere between twenty and thirty varieties of Hillfield apple juice. In season you can pick strawberries, raspberries, plums, greengages, tayberries, quince, medlars, pears, squash and pumpkins, and choose from more than 250 kinds of apple.
For a sit-down meal, the Priory Farm Restaurant at St Olaves does cider-braised belly pork, homemade steak-and-ale pie, beer-battered haddock with hand-cut chips and a Sunday carvery. St Olaves also has its priory, a free English Heritage ruin with a remarkably complete fourteenth-century brick-vaulted undercroft that was lived in as a cottage until 1902.
Walking is a major attraction here. A nine-mile circular from Haddiscoe station runs through woodland and grazing marsh under wide skies, with geese, ducks, swans and, if you are lucky, short-eared owls. It is proper marsh walking: wet ground, livestock, stiles and gates. With both village pubs closed, it is worth wearing boots and bringing your own lunch. The station itself is about a mile and a half out, unstaffed, on the Wherry Line between Norwich and Lowestoft, with an hourly service; the Lowestoft platform is reached by walking across the track on a barrow crossing. By road the village sits at the A143 junction toward Beccles and Great Yarmouth, and BorderBus 580 stops here on its way between Bungay, Beccles and Gorleston.
Domesday lists the place as Hadescou, "Haddr's wood," seventy households spread among seven owners; the king's own share of it had climbed in value from ten pounds to twenty-four in the twenty years after the Conquest. Norfolk's only Knights Templar preceptory stood here from 1218 until 1312, though nobody now knows where. In 2003 a machine scattered 316 silver coins across a field, probably buried during the Civil War. The junction of road, rail and water drew bombers in the last war, and the craters are still in the ground.
Sir John Arnesby Brown, who painted Norfolk skies for a living, lived in the village and lies in the churchyard, under the sort of wide grey light he spent his life trying to get onto canvas.