Rollesby

The broad and The Waterside

An Edwardian launch called Gentleman Jim runs a half-hour loop across Rollesby Broad. The broad is one of five that make up the Trinity Broads — Rollesby, Ormesby, Filby, Ormesby Little and Lily — and they are cut off from the rest of the network. No hire cruisers, no canoes, no paddleboards: canoes, kayaks and paddleboards are barred to reduce the risk of invasive species, and motorised holiday cruisers do not use the broads at all. It also supplies drinking water to the village and to Great Yarmouth.

The launch leaves from The Waterside, a tea room and gift shop on Main Road that looks straight out over the broad. The kitchen does beer-battered cod with chips and peas, Norfolk sausages with eggs and chips, and a ploughman's with either honey-roast ham or mature Cheddar. There is a homemade quiche of the day and, on Sundays, roast beef, turkey or pork. Breakfast runs from a Full English to Eggs Royale with smoked salmon and American-style pancakes.

Family extras and farm provisions

Around the café there is more than a menu: a Broads exhibition, a sculpture park, a herb garden and a wooden play area for younger children, who need an adult with them. The gift shop carries local arts and crafts. Dogs cannot go on the boat, and they cannot join the rowing dinghies offered in the school holidays either.

For provisions, The Tacons is a farm shop at The Grange on Fleggburgh Road, selling locally grown fruit and vegetables, homemade sausage rolls and granola, with pick-your-own strawberries and raspberries reported in season — worth checking before you go.

Sailing, walking and connections

The Rollesby Broad Sailing Club sails dinghies on the same stretch of water and keeps boats for members to hire, though it is a membership club rather than casual public hire. For walking, footpaths thread the reedbeds and wet woodland along the Trinity Broads, and a six-mile circular starts from Fleggburgh village hall and comes back round through Rollesby.

The village sits on the A149 between Rollesby and Ormesby Broads. Acle station, about five miles off, is the nearest, but Great Yarmouth, seven miles to the south-east, is usually the recommended railhead, and the Sanders X6 runs straight there, stopping in the village on the way.

St George's, Domesday and medieval peat diggings

St George's has a round west tower — 66 feet, the tallest round tower in Norfolk — with a circular twelfth-century base and octagonal upper stages added in the early fourteenth century. Four heraldic dogs, talbots, sit on the chancel's buttress turrets. Inside there is an octagonal font ringed by eight Purbeck-marble columns, a reclining effigy of Rose Claxton from 1601 that was once painted, and an alabaster monument to Leonard Mapes, his wife and their children, all shown praying. A small two-door room in the south-east corner of the chancel has no settled explanation, though reliquary and confessional have both been suggested.

The Domesday surveyors found Rollesby split between six owners. One of them, St Benet of Holme, held land here worth £1 6s 7d, with nine acres of meadow, woodland for three pigs and half a salthouse. The broad itself began as medieval peat diggings that later flooded.

The Sherlock Holmes connection

In the 1980s Bernard Davies of the Sherlock Holmes Society argued that Rollesby Hall was the model for Donnithorpe Hall in The Gloria Scott, the first case Holmes ever took, pointing to Victorian train times, horse-and-buggy travel and the line of the setting sun as evidence — though the theory has never been proven, and Horsey Hall is sometimes named as another candidate. The hall was pulled down in 1950. Conan Doyle described the view from it: "the long stretch of the Broads in front of us glimmering in the red light of the setting sun."