Barton Turf

Staithe, Broad and Summer Wildlife

Barton Staithe has a water point, and a little further along Paddy's Lane there are twenty-four-hour moorings run by the Broads Authority, which tells you most of what you need to know about how people arrive here. This is a small settlement on the edge of Barton Broad, the second largest of all the Norfolk Broads. The 153-hectare reserve around it mixes open water, fen, reedbed and wet carr woodland, and in summer you will see common terns, great crested grebes and cormorants over the broad. On the upper reaches of the Ant you might catch a crane, a bittern or a kingfisher.

The best short walk starts from the signed car park between Neatishead and Irstead, next to the Old Rectory. From there it is about a kilometre to a boardwalk that runs through wet woodland to a viewing platform over Barton Broad. The reserve is free to enter and the boardwalk is wheelchair-suitable, though only assistance dogs are allowed; the surrounding marshes hold swallowtail butterflies, Norfolk hawker dragonflies, marsh harriers, otters and water voles at the right times of year. Quieter lanes lead on towards Alderfen Broad, where another platform overlooks land-locked water.

Watersports and Inclusive Access

For getting onto the broad itself, the Barton Turf Adventure Centre is run by Di Smith, Ashley Cato and Sheila Fishwick as a family business teaching watersports and environmental studies. It works with schools, groups, families and individuals across a private fourteen-acre nature reserve. It is not a boat-hire yard, so arrive with a plan rather than an expectation of turning up and drifting off. Nearby, the Nancy Oldfield Trust runs sailing, canoeing, paddleboarding and motor cruises for disabled and disadvantaged people of any age, with families and carers welcome.

Neatishead Pub and Shop

The village has no pub and no shop of its own. Both are in neighbouring Neatishead: the White Horse Inn, a brew pub with its own Pell & Co beer, and White House Stores, a community-owned shop bought and reopened by the villages it serves. Dogs are welcome in all the bar areas of the White Horse, though not the restaurant, and there are water bowls for them.

St Michael and All Angels

The church stands about a mile from the clustered houses, out on higher ground above the marshes, and the parish council recommends the walk to it on a fine day. St Michael and All Angels is Grade I listed, with a fourteenth-century nave and a fifteenth-century tower. Inside is a painted chancel screen of about 1440 showing ranks of named saints and angels, among them St Apollonia, St Barbara, Raphael and Gabriel, with a second screen carrying St Edmund, Edward the Confessor, St Olave and Henry VI. The money for work of that quality may well have come from the peat.

Church, Peat and the Claypits

That peat is where the name comes from. Barton is Old English for a barley farm; the Turf is the turf and peat cut from the marshes, and the flooded medieval workings became the Broads themselves. The common was once called the Claypits, its three ponds—Hayletts, Dale and Forge—left behind by marling: digging clay for building and for improving the soil. Close-cropped grass now runs down to the reed-fringed water, and children use it for games while dog walkers take the paths between the benches.