The Norfolk and Suffolk Broads form England’s largest protected wetland — over 300 km of navigable waterways winding through reed beds, grazing marshes, and ancient woodland. The area has status equivalent to a National Park, managed by the Broads Authority, though it feels nothing like one: this is flat, quiet, watery country where the horizon is always wide and the light is always changing.
Most visitors come for the boating. You can hire a day cruiser or a traditional wooden sailing yacht and drift between medieval churches, waterside pubs, and nature reserves without ever touching a road. Hickling Broad and Barton Broad are particularly good for birdwatching — bitterns, marsh harriers, and swallowtail butterflies all breed here. The ruins of St Benet’s Abbey, accessible only by water, stand alone in the marshes where a drainage windmill pokes through the old gatehouse.
The Broads were long thought to be natural, but they are in fact medieval peat diggings that flooded as sea levels rose — one of England’s great accidental landscapes.