But his parishes were not neglected, and his kindnesses were many. He held evening classes for the young men, and as a magistrate often turned a blind eye to the poaching activities of his flock. Services were held every Sunday morning and evening at Irstead and Barton Turf alternately, occasionally he made a mistake and went to the wrong church. Finding it empty he’d hurry off to the other, across what is now Lime Kiln Dyke, arriving to find his congregation leisurely walking home. It was noted that his ‘philosophical nature’ led to forgetfulness; on one occasion he took some friends to the ‘playsure’ hill on the Broad, left the party there, became engrossed in his study and only after returning home and his wife enquiring whether the trip and been successful did he remember them. In the meantime there had been a heavy thunderstorm; history doesn’t relate their comments.
One of the six surviving children of Rev. William Gunn and Miss Anne Mack of Sloley; when his father resigned the livings of Irstead and Barton Turf in 1829 they were passed on to him by Bishop Bathurst of Norwich.
Unlike his father his great leisure interest was in the Natural Sciences, especially the local Geology of the coast and he eventually became a founding member and first president of the Norwich Geological Society. He also persisted in the idea, nearly a hundred years before it became accepted, that the Broads were man-made by peat digging in origin. He collected fossils from the cliffs and beaches, also local chalk pits and his collection is still being studied at the Castle Museum.
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He resigned in 1869 shortly after his wife’s death. Then continuing with his geological studies by 1876 he had become interested in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution with which he agreed having noticed the evidence of transition in a series of Mastodon and Elephant teeth he had collected. Tall, upright and active to the last he died in 1890.
Illustrations of the Rood Screen at Barton Turf' with notes by Revd J. Gunn of Barton Turf and drawings by C.J.W. Winter was published by Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society in 1869. A copy which was given to Barton Turf Church now resides in the Norfolk Record Office.