From the square, you head west past the front of the town hall (built in a mixture of styles). Further down Bridge Street is the public library, at one time the Friends' Meeting House (the Quaker burial ground lies just behind it).
As Bridge Street changes to Railway Road, it broadens out: on the left is a wide verge called The Green, and on the right is Dial House. This old carrstone house (now a guesthouse) is named from the sundial on the gable facing the road and was once the home of the head maltster of a nearby maltings, later becoming a Quaker school due to considerable support for the nonconformist tradition in this area.
Beyond the mill — which sports a carved eagle over the doorcase facing the road — you cross the railway and go over the broad Relief Channel flowing to King's Lynn. The walk continues along the Fen Rivers Way, which follows the south bank of the River Great Ouse (the river, with its tributaries and associated man-made waterways, drains nearly 1,500 square miles or 3,885 square kilometres of central England).
As you walk up the riverbank, the superstructures of the great steel sluice gates are visible ahead. The gates are a vital part of the drainage and flood prevention system for the wide stretch of low-lying fens south of Downham Market, where three drainage channels meet at Denver Sluice.
The walk leaves the riverbank and heads up the road to the village of Denver. The first place of interest in the village is Denver Mills: a lofty tower windmill with a white ogee cap, a fantail, and a white plastic body girdled by an exterior walkway rising dramatically from the surrounding flat fens (Denver Windmill is Grade II listed).
In 1816, the mill was the scene of rioting after millers and farmers raised grain and flour prices. The increases — a reflection of higher taxes brought in to pay for the Napoleonic Wars and a poor harvest — incensed the population, who attacked several mills, throwing flour around and causing havoc.
The route continues up the road past attractive brick-built East Hall Manor. George William Manby was born here in 1765; a naval captain, scientist, and Fellow of the Royal Society, Manby invented the rocket apparatus still used to fire a line to a ship in distress, as well as the first modern form of the universal fire extinguisher.
As you leave Denver, you pass St Mary's Church, built of local stone and featuring a tower dating from the 13th century. A walk across the fields takes you back into Downham Market along a leafy chestnut avenue with a very old carrstone and brick wall on your right.
The town sign stands on an island where London Road meets Church Road and the High Street. Given to the town by the local Women's Institute to mark the Federation's Golden Jubilee in 1965, it shows a small boy sailing a boat. When Horatio Nelson was at school in Downham Market, he supposedly got his fellow pupils to operate the pump so that he could sail paper boats down the gutter in the middle of the market square.
In Howdale Road, you pass remaining parts of the Old Union Workhouse, built mainly of carrstone using small slabs with deeply recessed pointing (reminiscent of Derbyshire dry-stone walling, but of a very different colour). Number 12 is a Montessori School: Maria Montessori, an Italian doctor born in 1870, developed a child-led method of education that built on children's natural curiosity.
Further up Howdale Road, you come to a grassy triangle where the town pump now stands (its usefulness declined over the years, and it was retired from the market square to decorate the green).
You head towards the town church across an undulating open area known as the Howdale, which was the main source of carrstone until overtaken in popularity by brick. In the northwest corner, a track called King's Walk runs beside the cemetery down to Church Road, opposite a narrow, high-walled alley running steeply down to the market place called Sounding Alley after a Georgian bell foundry sited nearby.
There has been a church on the ridgetop site of St Edmund's since the days of the Normans, though altered many times since then (judging from its bricks, the top of the tower was probably rebuilt in Tudor times, while most interior features are from the 18th century). The end of the walk is a short way downhill from here.
