The white windpump stands at the end of Thurne Dyke, a whitewashed-brick tower tapering up to a weatherboarded cap and a conspicuous landmark from both road and river. It was built in 1820 to drain the surrounding marsh for farming and it turned until 1936, when its striking rod broke and it stopped. By 1948 it was derelict but had kept all its machinery. In 1949 Ronald Dorian "Bob" Morse bought it from the drainage board and saved it from the post-war scrap threat, and successive restorations followed. The volunteers who now look after it close their account of all this with the line, "A lucky mill indeed."
The dyke runs about 270 metres inland from the River Thurne, and it is older than the boats suggest. It appears, with its staithe, on William Faden's county map of 1797, and the 1820 enclosure award reserved both for parish landholders to unload corn, manure and other goods. The moorings that now fill with holiday cruisers sit on what was a working wharf.
At the village end of that wharf is the Lion, a large pub with a separate bar and restaurant, a real fire and a big garden that runs down toward the water, serving road visitors and river ones in equal measure. The kitchen leans on familiar things done properly, and reviewers keep coming back to the same favourites: fish and chips, pie, burgers, and a hog pizza with chunky chips. Humpty Dumpty Farrier is a regular on the bar, and the house ales are badged Pell & Co. East Norfolk CAMRA named it their Pub of the Year in 2019. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the snug, though not the restaurant, and there are water bowls if you ask.
Next to the pub, Ramblers is a seasonal gift shop and small gallery that also keeps a modest run of basic groceries and local produce. You will find locally made jams, chutneys, ice cream, soap and hand lotion, alongside Thurne souvenirs, pottery lamps by David Taylor and paintings by local artists. It is not a food shop; for a full weekly shop you will need to drive out of the village, but for a jar of chutney and a postcard it does the job.
The church of St Edmund sits back on Flegg's slightly higher ground, placed above the flood line and looking west across the marshes toward the ruins of St Benet's Abbey. It is a flint building with ashlar dressings and, unusually, a thatched roof, its late-13th-century tower square and unbuttressed. The last monks left St Benet's in 1545; the walk out to it across the grazing marsh is one of the quieter things to do here.
Most people come for the water. The staithe is a picnic-and-stroll stop for passing boats, with overnight mooring and a large play area on the green beside the Lion. The Thurne Circular is a 3.3-mile loop from the staithe using the Weavers' Way, South Oby Dyke and the river, with kissing gates and no stiles, walkable in a couple of hours; a longer route runs out to Clippesby. The Weavers' Way passes straight through the village on its way from Cromer to Great Yarmouth, and a short stretch of it reaches the Wind Energy Museum at Repps-with-Bastwick.
Thurne Mouth, where the river meets the Bure just downstream, is a decision point in the Three Rivers Race, billed by its crews as "Europe's toughest inland sailing race": more than fifty miles, three bridges and up to twenty-four hours. Boats reaching the Mouth can turn either way, and the organisers call that choice perhaps the most critical of the whole race, since it turns on wind, tide and the boat under you.
The nearest station is Acle, a few miles off on the Greater Anglia line; the lanes in reach the village from the B1152, and the 72A bus calls at Thurne on weekdays, bank holidays excepted, if you book it by three the afternoon before, or by the Friday for a Monday trip. However you come, you tend to end up in the same spot: the bench by the dyke, the white mill above you, a cruiser easing in to moor while someone on deck works out where the ropes go.