At the foot of New Inn Hill, The Street runs down to Rockland Staithe, where Boat Dyke opens onto Rockland Broad. There is a public car park here, a Broads Authority mooring basin with electric charging points, and free twenty-four-hour moorings a little further along Short Dyke. The broad itself is a wide sheet of lily-covered water fringed with reed, made not by nature alone but by medieval peat digging that later flooded.
Opposite the water stands the New Inn, the village's only pub. It closed in November 2023 and is now registered as an Asset of Community Value, with renovation and a reopening as a community hub reported as the plan. For the moment the prominent building by the staithe is shut, so it is worth arriving with your own supplies rather than a table booked.
Those supplies are easy to find. The Post Office and Store at 41 The Street advertises its own bread, fruit and vegetables, groceries, an off-licence, ice cream and hot and cold food to take away, and doubles as an Amazon collection and returns point. Karen, Alan and Emma Tranter run it. Out on Bramerton Lane, Applebee Orchard and Apiary has been kept by Ruth and John Everett for more than forty-five years, selling its own Norfolk honey, beeswax, fruit, jam and vegetables, along with bees, hives and beginners' beekeeping courses.
The walking is the reason most people come. The Wherryman's Way makes a seven-mile circuit from the staithe car park, out past Surlingham church and the RSPB's Church Marsh, on to the ruin of St Saviour's and the graves of the naturalists Ted and Phyllis Ellis, then round by Coldham Hall and Wheatfen before returning with the broad in view. A shorter spur follows an easy-access track to the Rockland Broad hide. If you want something level, the RSPB's Rockland Marshes has a wide surfaced path from the car park towards the river — uneven and potholed in places, with latched gates and no toilets, but manageable with a pushchair or wheelchair. Keep dogs on the lead; the reward is great crested grebes, kingfishers and, on a good morning, a barn owl working the marsh.
Out on the broad, a line of low tree-covered islands marks the Slaughters: old wherries deliberately sunk in 1931 to improve the flow of water, now grown over. The broad once carried working traffic — coal in by wherry for the village brickworks, bricks and bundles of thatching reed out the same way, market-garden produce to Norwich by horse and cart. Among the men who worked it was Jimmy "Scientific" Fuller, who shot and collected birds on the water for fifty years.
St Mary's stands back from the water, mostly fourteenth-century, its flint walls dressed with ashlar and heavily restored in the 1890s. The square west tower is unbuttressed and tapers towards a crenellated parapet; the bells inside date to 1599. The font is fifteenth-century, octagonal, carved with shield-bearing angels and brightly painted saints. Four metres east of the chancel lie a few flint fragments of St Margaret's, a second medieval church that once shared the churchyard. It had no tower and a thatched roof, and fell into decay after the two parishes were joined. The Domesday clerks recorded the place as Rokelunda, understood locally as Old Norse for a grove of rooks.
Getting here is easiest by car: Run Lane meets the A146 at Hellington Corner, and Norwich lies about six miles to the northwest. Brundall is the practical railhead, with regular trains to Norwich, Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft, and the number 85 bus links the village to the city Monday to Saturday.
In the early twentieth century the guidebook writer W. A. Dutt called it "an isolated hamlet with a small staithe at which the wherries moor." The wherries have gone, but the staithe is still there, and on a still evening the water holds the sky and very little else.