Little Ouse River

The Little Ouse is a tributary of the Great Ouse, and a separate river from the Yorkshire Ouse it shares part of a name with. It rises in low fen on the Norfolk–Suffolk border, close to the source of the River Waveney, which drains the opposite way, and for much of its course it marks the boundary between the two counties before crossing into Cambridgeshire fen. It joins the Great Ouse at Brandon Creek.

The navigable water runs from that junction upstream for about 16 miles, through a single lock, to the edge of Brandon. Below Brandon the river is Fenland — straight, embanked, flowing through drained peat; above it, the country turns to the sandy heaths of Breckland and the pines of Thetford Forest. It is managed for navigation by the Environment Agency, and it is quiet water, used by small craft and anglers rather than by the hire fleets of the Broads.

There has long been a campaign to reopen navigation the whole way up to Thetford, which fell out of use in the last century; a feasibility study judged that several new locks would be needed to do it. For now the head of navigation stops short of the town, and the upper river is left to the walkers who follow it on foot through the forest and along the county boundary.