It is located on the summit of ground sloping steeply towards the estuary of the River Waveney, in the civil parish of Burgh Castle, in the county of Norfolk (but until 1974 in Suffolk).

[1] Burgh is derived from the same Old English language word burh (whose dative singular and nominative/accusative plural form byrig sometimes underlies modern place-names, and which had dialectal variants including burg; it was also sometimes confused with beorh, beorg, 'mound, hill'.

[2] The Old English word was originally used for a fortified town or proto-castle, as in Burgh Castle, and was related to the verb beorgan (cf.

[1] Burgh Castle has been suggested as the site of Cnobheresburg, the unknown place (a castrum or fort) in East Anglia, where in about 630 the first Irish monastery in southern England was founded by Saint Fursey, as part of the Hiberno-Scottish mission described by Bede.

However a detailed report by Stephen Johnson of Norfolk Museums Service in 1983 (East Anglian Archaeology 20) concluded that there was no definitive evidence for any monastic settlement in Burgh Castle itself.

This is likely to reflect a popular sense of the site having been the home of an ancient but enigmatic people, and perhaps its use as a quarry for building materials.

It is located on the eastern bank of the southernmost part of Breydon Water, formed at the mouths of the rivers Bure, Yare, and Waveney.

[citation needed] It is one of the settings in the mystery A Pretty Deceit by Anna Lee Huber, published in October 2020.