We leapt off a canoe into a clear stream, scattering duck and pike alike, letting the mud ooze into our toes from the silty bed. On the bank, teenagers swung from a rope tailed around a tree, letting go at the highest point to create the biggest, most hormonal splash. The sun glowed down on the waterfowl and cows on the huge common, then we went for lashings of malty micro-brew in the Green Dragon (Broad St, +44 (0)1986 892681).
This was last summer in the newly infamous town of Bungay, on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. When you leave the A143 from Bury St Edmunds to Great Yarmouth, and nose into the market town - close to where Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is holed up in Ellingham Hall - you enter a world where, in the nicest possible way, time becomes elastic. Strangers say hello; little independent shops sell toys, wicker baskets and sit-up-and-beg bicycles; people chatter over morning coffee - all in a world overlooked by ochre houses, pantiled eaves and the flinty ruins of a castle.
This market town is part of a clutch of underrated market towns - of which Bungay is probably the finest - strung out along the border of the two East Anglian counties. Get past the agri-business between Bury St Edmunds and Diss, and you enter deep meadowlands, familiar to anyone who has ever admired a John Constable painting, where willow trees and emerald fields cleave towards lazy creeks. It's not as well trodden by tourists as the Stour valley - which passes actual Constable country - but the Waveney is just as pretty and part of an England profonde in a way that you scarcely find any longer two or so hours from London. Tractors ply the lanes, forcing the impatient to take stock. Honesty boxes sit outside houses for home produce: eggs, runner beans, blowsy brassicas. Manure is usually free.
I go to Bungay whenever my mood needs altering. It's a place with a noble past and, I think, a great future. The centre is a tight knot of old buildings, mostly Georgian: Bungay had its Great Fire in 1688, 22 years after London. (Indeed, Bungay was quite an important spa resort in the 18th century; apparently known as Little London). Plenty of large Queen Anne mansions testify to past greatness, but Bungay's current industry is primarily supplied by the printing company Clays, as economically vital as it is unsightly.
Still, there are plenty of nice things to look at in Bungay, and lots of leisure for passersby. The best walk in town is up through the castle, which belonged to Hugh Bigod, the Norman baron. Some believe that Bigod gave rise to the word "bigot", which is contested. But there's no doubt Hugh was a bit of a hardcase, taunting Henry II as the "king of cockney". There's still a touch of anti-metropolitan sentiment if you look hard, but today Hugh's gaff is a peaceful ruin where, when the birch trees bend in the wind, your imagination soars. Walk round to posh Earsham Street and you'll find the terrific Black Dog antiques (51 Earsham Street) - the town's anti-mascot is the Black Dog, a devil-in-disguise hell-hound that invaded St Mary's Perpendicular nave in 1577. Here, you browse through wooden antiques and old coins metal-detected from local fields: you might even find a Roman one. But you'll need modern dough at the Castle Inn (35 Earsham Street, +44 (0)1986 892283, thecastleinn.net, double rooms from £85 a night), Bungay's smartest restaurant, which won a regional Best Sunday Lunch award in this year's Observer Food Monthly Awards.
Bungay's greatest pull, these days, is the Fisher Theatre (10 Broad Street, +44 (0)1986 897130, fishertheatre.org). This 1828-vintage playhouse was restored and reopened in 2006, true to the vision of Georgian entertainer and entrepreneur David Fisher. Now it's a lively mix of local productions and musical events, with a preponderance of folk music, plus a cool modern cafe attached to its side.
After coffee in the Fisher, I'd walk along Broad Street and turn down Bridge Street. Tobermory and Alnmouth are known for vivid frontages, but Bungay matches them on Bridge Street, with purple, red and green houses ranged up a hill. And if you follow Bridge Street down, you'll get to the water meadows and ultimately, to Assange's hideout. Leave him alone and instead, trace round the river back into town past round-towered Holy Trinity Church, and yet more ruins: the old monastery behind deconsecrated St Mary's.
There are enough things in the area to detain you for a fun weekend: the great St Peter's Brewery (St Peter's Hall, St Peter South Elmham, Bungay, +44 (0)1986 782322, stpetersbrewery.co.uk) is a visitor attraction in the Saints, a plateau thus named as the villages all start with the prefix "St". It's a wuthering landscape of ancient fields and blasted oaks, where hares dash across ploughed fields, and you can feel mysteriously alone. After a walk here, a drink at the Rumburgh Buck (Mill Road, +44 (0)1986 785257), the celebrated village boozer at Rumburgh, is a must.
But on a hot day you'll probably want to linger by the river Waveney, which loops around Bungay and is its greatest asset - one that in its relative secrecy attracts those in search of deep English wilderness.
Roger Deakin, the environmentalist film-maker and wild swimming advocate who wrote Waterlog, cited it as his favourite river, and this is the territory that informed Richard Mabey's Nature Cure. It's a world of Swallows and Amazons-style weirs, camping and canoes: indeed, in Arthur Ransome's Coot Club, the children sail back on the Waveney from Yarmouth and moor at Beccles, Bungay's big sister upriver (where Assange currently signs in at the police station).
This is the start of the south Broads: the quieter, wilder bit of England's largest wetlands, before you get up to the ice-cream-and-cruiser part of the National Park. Every summer, I take a canoe from Outney Meadow Caravan Park (+44 (0)1986 892338, outneymeadow.co.uk) a super-friendly campsite and gateway to the vast broad, surrounded by meadows so rangy that in high summer, you might think the Savannah had landed in East Anglia. We splash upstream, usually to the house where Rider Haggard grew up, swimming, larking about and spotting perch in the clear water. Next year we'll do the big one: a canoe return awayday to the Locks Inn at Geldeston (Locks Lane, Geldeston, +44 (0)1508 518414, geldestonlocks.co.uk). Can't wait.
Getting there
Bungay is off the A143 between Bury St Edmunds and Great Yarmouth, about two and half hours from London. The nearest train station is Beccles, or Diss, nationalexpresseastanglia.com.
