The Surlingham Ferry House stands on the south bank of the River Yare with free moorings for patrons who arrive by boat, and you can fish from the same bank. Sonia has run it since 2009. Inside there is a log fire; outside, a beer garden and the river to watch. The kitchen does homemade meals and breakfasts, and dogs are welcome. The building dates from 1725 and has been, at various points, an ice store for coastal fish merchants, a coal depot and a courthouse for collecting tithes. It kept a ferry until 1939, when a coaster ran into it. A long-serving landlord, Herbert Whitmore, known to everyone as Simon, died in 2001 at ninety-three. Local tradition adds a ghost: a man with a dog who finishes any beer left out overnight.
A short way along the river, Coldham Hall Tavern has traded since 1809. It has a bar, a snug and gardens, runs a barbecue in season, and keeps local real ales. Dogs are allowed in the bar, snug and gardens on a lead. The old wherry slip beside it survives from the years when flat-bottomed Norfolk wherries carried peat, hay, livestock and bricks up and down the Yare, and both pubs served that trade.
Surlingham has no compact centre. It runs loose and linear along lanes about six and a half miles south-east of Norwich, farmland on one side and fen, reedbed and grazing marsh sloping toward the river on the other. Cows still graze the marshes in summer. The Konectbus 85 threads through School Lane, Ferry Road and Coldham Hall on its way between Rockland St Mary and Norwich; the nearest railway station, Brundall, sits just across the water.
For provisions, Yare Valley Oils runs a self-service farm shop at Grange Farm on Mill Road, where the family grows, crushes and bottles its own extra-virgin cold-pressed rapeseed oil, sold bottled or on tap alongside farm-reared beef, potatoes, seasonal vegetables, eggs, bread and milk. There is a Portuguese and French patisserie, Teles, on another farm, and Winbirri Vineyard sells wine and runs tastings and tours. The nearest post office and general store is at Rockland St Mary, about a mile and a half off.
From opposite the church, Church Marsh offers loops of a mile and a half or two miles down to the Yare and a bird hide; the longer one passes the Ferry House and the ruined church, and it turns very muddy in winter. On the RSPB's reedbed circuit you might see bitterns and gadwall in winter, marsh harriers and kingfishers later in the year. Wheatfen, fifty-two hectares of fen, reedbed and wet woodland with two small broads, is threaded by boardwalks with names like Smee Loke, Penguin Dyke and the 11 Bridges Path; swallowtail butterflies, Norfolk hawker dragonflies and otters live here. This was the fen the naturalist Ted Ellis studied for forty years from his home on the reserve.
The Church of St Mary keeps a fifteenth-century octagonal font carved with seated lions and shield-bearing angels, and two of its six bells were cast in 1381. There is a round west tower with a later octagonal belfry, and inside a small brass laid down for John Alnwick in 1460. Down toward the marshes stands the roofless flint shell of St Saviour's, whose parish was folded into St Mary's in 1705; the building was then robbed for its stone and left to the weather, until it was repaired and preserved in 2011. Ted Ellis and his wife Phyllis are buried inside it, within sight of the water he studied for forty years.