Ludham

Traditional sailing on Womack Water

At Hunter's Yard on Womack Water, fourteen wooden cabin yachts and two half-deckers built in the 1930s are still rigged and sailed. Percy Hunter and his sons started the boatyard in that decade, and the fleet, since added to by six donated wooden half-deckers, remains much as it was: traditional sailing craft kept in varnish, with some now fitted with electric engines.

Womack Staithe is where much of the village meets the water. There are public moorings, a green with seats and shade, drinking water, toilets and a small shop for basic supplies. Ludham sits enclosed on three sides by the rivers Ant, Bure and Thurne, with Womack Water as its own small broad, so you are never far from a boat.

Two pubs, two settings

The two pubs sit apart. The Kings Arms, run by the same family since 1989, is in the church-centred core and built around its carvery; the choice of meats and vegetables is what regulars go back for. Dogs are welcome in the bar and garden but not the restaurant, and there is a play area outside. The Dog stands off at Ludham Bridge, on Johnson Street, a dining pub with locally brewed real ales and a small campsite. Its menu runs to beer-battered haddock, Cumberland sausage and mash, Hunter's chicken, honey-mustard ham with eggs and chips, and a ploughman's with pork pie and pickled egg; the specials board has turned up a Stilton-and-beef pie. There is a water station and waterproof dog beds, covered outdoor seating and another play area.

For everything else there is Throwers, the village grocer and Post Office, run by the same family since 1902; a butcher on the High Street; and Dotty's Bistro, in the old fire station on Latchmoor Lane, where Amy and her team do brunch, artisan bakes and takeaway.

St Catherine's Church and medieval art

St Catherine's is the parish church, Grade I and mostly fourteenth and fifteenth century, with bequests for new work recorded from 1466. Inside are a hammerbeam roof of about that date and a painted chancel screen of 1493 whose panels are an important example of fifteenth-century English art. The chancel-arch tympanum carries a painted Crucifixion on one face and Elizabeth I's arms on the other. The font is carved with angels, foliage and wild men, among them a female woodwose thought to be the only one in East Anglia. The Bishop of Norwich is still rector here, and also Abbot of St Benet's.

St Benet's Abbey and How Hill

St Benet's Abbey, on the Bure, was the one English monastery Henry VIII never formally dissolved, which is why the bishop keeps the abbot's title. You can walk to it. The circular route from How Hill runs about seven and a quarter miles past Toad Hole Cottage, a tiny 1740s marshman's house of brick and thatch, and a string of drainage mills, one of which was turned into a two-storey pillbox during the war. If you would rather not walk, How Hill runs a fifty-minute trip on the Electric Eel out to a bird hide.

Routes, connections and a Broads coda

There is no railway station; the 5B bus stops by the Kings Arms and church and runs through to Norwich station via Wroxham. The Domesday surveyors valued the abbey's holding here at six pounds, up from five twenty years before; that holding recorded a hundred and twenty freemen. The naturalist Ted Ellis called the Broads "a breathing space for the cure of souls." From Womack Staithe on a still evening, with the Hunter's Yard sails put away for the night, that is not a hard case to make.