The Bell Inn keeps its own moorings on the River Waveney, so boats can tie up, though it's worth checking with the pub first. It has a 40-plus-seat restaurant, a large patio and gardens overlooking the river, and it takes dogs inside and out. The building goes back to the late sixteenth century in its protected fabric, though the pub's own tradition puts it earlier: built around 1520 as the ferryman's base, when travellers wanting to cross the river rang his bell. It calls itself the oldest recorded inn in Broadland.
St Olave's Bridge stands on the site of that ferry crossing, a cast-iron bowstring-girder structure George Edwards rebuilt in 1847, after a stone bridge of around 1509 and centuries of proposals before it — one recorded in 1297, another in 1422. The deck was renewed in 1920 and the pedestrian walkway added in 1960. Beccles Road crosses here, and just over the water is Haddiscoe station, unstaffed, with a ticket machine and step-free access to both platforms, though the Lowestoft side is reached by a barrow crossing at track level.
St Olaves sits at the southern edge of the Broads, with the Waveney along its southern boundary and the Yare to the west. The land west of the village is marsh, dotted with the sites of old drainage mills. The Angles Way, a ninety-three-mile trail from Great Yarmouth to Thetford, follows the Waveney Valley through here and gives flat waterside walking. Take it north and it brings you to Burgh Castle, a late-third-century Roman fort whose walls still stand nearly to their full height, with views over Breydon Water.
For a hamlet this size there is more going on than you would expect. The village hall has a sports field of roughly a hundred by sixty-five yards and runs dog-training classes, meditation, bellydance, and Viking and Saxon re-enactment. The 580 bus stops at the Post Office from Monday to Saturday, linking St Olaves to Beccles, Bungay, Gorleston and Great Yarmouth, and the marina keeps the hamlet's working relationship with the water going.
The priory is the reason for the name. Roger FitzOsbert founded an Augustinian house here in about 1216, which is why the older settlement of Herringfleet — Herlingaflet in Domesday, four households and a single carucate, held in 1066 by a free man called Wulfsi and by 1086 recorded as the King's — eventually gave way to St Olaves. The priory was suppressed in 1537, after an inventory the year before found little of value. What survives is worth the walk: a fourteenth-century refectory undercroft with a nearly complete brick vault carried on Purbeck-marble columns, still holding much of its original plaster, and an important early example of the use of brick in England. Sir Henry Jerningham built a house into the ruins in 1547; from about 1825 the undercroft was lived in as a cottage, until 1902. In 1823 stone was carted off from the ruins to repair the church at Herringfleet.
There are quieter layers too — trenches from the First World War in Waveney Forest, and concrete hut bases and an anti-tank mortar mount left from the Second — the sort of thing you walk past without noticing unless someone points it out.