The Crown Inn puts its guests up in a detached building that used to be the village doctor's surgery. Inside the pub itself there is a real fire in winter, a separate dining room, and a garden CAMRA calls secluded. Scott and Gail run it, and Scott does the cooking: home food with an Italian influence, plus fish and chips and pizza as takeaways on certain evenings. Dishes have included steak-and-kidney suet pudding, bangers and mash, ham, egg and chips, and Sunday roasts in three portion sizes, so you can order according to how much of the day you have already spent walking. Dogs are welcomed with water and treats. The real ales change and lean local.
The pub has been here since at least 1794. Between about 1896 and 1960 it drew frequent visits from traditional singers, among them Harry Cox, William "Bullets" Miller, Jack "Fruit" Riseborough and Bob "Sky" Parker.
The other fixed point is Catfield Stores and Post Office on The Street, a Premier shop that carries fresh bread, fruit and vegetables, meat and poultry, newspapers and the frozen basics. It's useful for topping up provisions without a special trip to Stalham, the nearest market town, about three miles off.
Catfield sits between Barton and Hickling Broads on farmland that gives way to reed and open water. It was once a wherry hub: three staithes worked the River Ant while Catfield Staithe served the dyke running towards the Thurne, sending out farm produce and taking in corn, coal, manure and building materials. Catfield Staithe still has three 24-hour moorings, and the dyke still connects to Hickling Broad.
Catfield Fen, part of the Ant Broads and Marshes reserve, is one of the strongholds of the swallowtail butterfly, but most of it is genuinely closed off: hidden ditches, soft dyke sides and water under the vegetation. The way to see it is the Rond, the raised bank along the western and southern edges, which looks into the fen and, in season, at swallowtails working the milk parsley. For an easier outing, the Barton Broad boardwalk from Long Road at Irstead runs through wet woodland to the water. From Hickling you can take a guided electric-boat trip on the twelve-seat *Swallowtail* or *Damselfly*.
All Saints' is Grade I and worth the detour. The chancel screen carries fifteen canonised kings and one queen painted along its base, a wall painting of the Stoning of St Stephen dated to about 1377, and a small upper room over the two-storey porch. The poet William Cowper stayed at the Old Rectory beside the churchyard with his uncle, the rector, and his aunt, and later wrote: "Of al the places in the earth, I love Catfield."
The village is just off the A149, with Sanders buses calling at the village hall and the nearest trains at Hoveton and Wroxham. Out in the marsh stands Swim Coots windpump, also called Ling's Mill, a brick tower whose scoopwheel has lost its paddles but still sits where water runs through it.