The slipway beside the Ferry Inn is still there, the remains of a crossing that was once the only way over the River Bure to Acle. The pub stands on its site now, with wooden settles and beams inside, coal fires in winter, and a south-facing garden that runs down to its own moorings. CAMRA rates it highly and notes that while it looks isolated by car, "as the broads cruiser steers it is on a motorway."
The menu is broader than the setting suggests. There is fish and chips with mushy peas, a chunky homemade fish-finger sandwich, sweet-chilli calamari, creamy garlic-and-Stilton mushrooms on toast, shell-on king prawns in garlic and chilli, Cajun chicken Alfredo, a red Thai vegetable curry, a vegan three-bean chilli, loaded fries, and a traditional Sunday roast. There is a children's section, and an area for them inside. Adnams Ghost Ship is the regular cask beer, with two others changing through the year, and dogs are welcome.
In 2020, after the village's standalone shop had closed, the licensee Alison Brewster turned an unused poolroom at the inn into a small store. It sells essentials, homemade cakes and locally sourced food, and serves people arriving by boat as much as residents.
The green sits by the water with swings and a slide, free riverside parking, and a handful of free moorings by the car park. Stokesby is a compact settlement of cottages gathered around this green and its staithe on the north bank, and from the waterfront the view opens across grazing marshes and drainage dykes into the flat, wide Broads.
A waymarked circular walk of about four and a quarter miles starts at the car park, a hundred metres from the pub. It crosses grazing marshes where cattle graze and dragonflies and damselflies work the dykes in season, passing old wind pumps that once drained the land and now stand retired in favour of electric ones. Keep dogs on leads around the livestock. A riverside path below the pub runs the other way towards Great Yarmouth, past a derelict mill, with St Andrew's visible back across the fields.
The church stands just beyond the village, reached by a signed footpath off the Runham road that leads through the churchyard. Its west tower is 13th century and the roof is thatched. Inside are six medieval benches with poppyheads carved into animals and a kneeling woman at prayer, and brasses set in the chancel floor for Edmund Clere and his wife Elizabeth, dated 1488. During the restoration of 1856 to 1858, workmen uncovered ancient wall paintings and then accidentally destroyed them.
The staithe is a reminder of how the village worked before roads, when black-sailed wherries unloaded reeds and timber here. It was a substantial place long before that. Domesday recorded fifty-eight households, putting Stokesby among the largest fifth of English settlements, along with three salthouses and a hundred and eighty sheep. The surveyors valued it at £10 17s 2d, nearly double what it had been worth twenty years earlier.
Trett's Mill, a four-storey brick corn tower of 1826, still stands with its machinery inside; Historic England likens its weatherboarded, corrugated-iron cap to a Nissen hut.
Acle, the nearest station, is a couple of miles off on the Wherry Line between Norwich and Great Yarmouth. A pre-book bus, the 72A, runs to Acle on weekdays if you arrange it the day before. Great Yarmouth is nine miles away, and nearer still, Thrigby Hall Wildlife Gardens keeps snow leopards, red pandas and tigers among landscaped gardens two and a half centuries old.
The village hall was the school until 1978, when it closed with fifteen pupils on the roll. More than a thousand children had passed through it across the century it taught, and when it shut the villagers bought the building rather than lose it.