Qualla: Acle

Acle: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stavros1 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name is a confession. Acle means 'oaks lea' in Old English - a clearing in an oak forest - and in Tudor times that forest was felled to build Elizabeth I's warships. Hundreds of oaks went south to the shipwrights and never returned. The town that remains sits in the clearing they left behind, halfway between Norwich and Great Yarmouth, holding the only bridge across the River Bure for miles in either direction.

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Image: Stavros1 at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Acle: Port at the Head of an Estuary

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Adrian S Pye, CC BY-SA 2.0. In Roman times Acle was a port. The whole landscape around it was different then - a wide tidal estuary called Gariensis reached deep inland, and Acle stood at its head, where the high ground met the water. The estuary silted up over centuries, the coastline shifted east, and Acl...

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Image: Adrian S Pye | CC BY-SA 2.0

Acle: The Turbary Right

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Evelyn Simak, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1382 Acle won a right that defined Broads life for the next five hundred years: turbary, the right to dig peat. The peat workings in this part of Norfolk were so extensive that when they flooded centuries later they became the Broads themselves - the network of shallow lakes a...

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Image: Evelyn Simak | CC BY-SA 2.0

Acle: St Edmund's Round Tower

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aleister Crowley 20:33, 19 January 2007 (UTC), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Church of St Edmund stands on the village edge with one of Norfolk's 124 surviving round-tower churches rising from its corner. The round stage at the base is Saxon, dated somewhere between 850 and 950 AD - a thousand years and more of weather and prayer have not toppled it. ...

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Image: Aleister Crowley 20:33, 19 January 2007 (UTC) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Acle: The Damgate Kingfisher

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kevin Hale, CC BY-SA 2.0. Since the turn of the century, volunteers have built a walkway running from the railway station to Boat Dyke, threading through the kind of indigenous flora most villages have lost. They call it Damgate. Walkers report a kingfisher there - locally known as Henry - who is said to ...

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Image: Kevin Hale | CC BY-SA 2.0