Halvergate

The Red Lion and the Marsh Edge

The Red Lion is thatched, stands on the Weavers' Way, and is the only pub Halvergate has left. Wolf Brewery ales are usually on, with the occasional guest cask, and in winter there is a fire. Out the back there is a garden and a bowling green. The regulars are a mix of locals and walkers coming in off the marshes, and the pub keeps up a quiz and vinyl nights; dogs are welcome. East Norfolk CAMRA calls it a "refreshingly traditional local." It was licensed as the Lion by September 1789, when John Browne held the licence, and it remains the village's only surviving pub.

The marsh edge is the reason to come. Halvergate sits on rising, tree-backed ground at the western lip of a drained former estuary between the Rivers Yare and Bure, which gives it the odd look of a village set on a hill above flat, open grazing. The marshes below hold one of the greatest concentrations of drainage mills in Europe.

Mutton's Mill and the Marsh Trails

Mutton's Mill is the one to walk out to. It is a four-storey windpump of tarred brick with a boat-shaped cap, restored around 1980, and its internal scoop wheel is the only one of its kind left in the Broads. High's, North and Six Mile House mills survive nearby.

The Halvergate Mills Trail opened in 2022 and crosses this country of waterways, wildlife and mills, with starts here and at Wickhampton, Berney Arms station and the Berney Arms moorings. A ten-mile Weavers' Way circuit begins at the church. Fit and experienced walkers can attempt a longer marsh loop of more than fourteen kilometres, past twenty-odd mills, though you should expect mud, standing water and grazing livestock, and check where dogs are allowed. Berney Arms itself has no road; it is reached on foot, by train or by boat, and the request-stop trains are sparse enough to be worth checking twice.

Medieval Stone and Deeper History

St Peter and St Paul stands over the village, a large medieval church with a tall west tower of about 1450 rising from flint walls patterned with flushwork. The nave and chancel are early 14th century. Inside there are medieval brasses and a tiny, complete early-14th-century stained-glass St Christopher, now set in a frame; three stone statues were taken down from the tower in 1958.

The land has been worked far longer than the church suggests, with Neolithic finds, Bronze Age ring ditches and the cropmarks of Roman field systems under the marsh. By 1086 Halvergate was already a substantial place: 69 households and 960 sheep, valued to its lord at £17, with King William holding it himself. Getting here was the difficulty. In June 1795 the agricultural writer William Marshall set out for Great Yarmouth and found that "for nearly the first mile, we rode to our horses' knees in water." The Acle New Road and its Halvergate branch, opened in 1831, greatly improved access.

War Marks and Ways In

The war left marks too: a pillbox, a Home Guard post, loopholes cut in Whiteacres barn, and a memorial unveiled in 2023 to airmen killed in three separate crashes on the marshes.

Acle station, about two and a half miles away in a straight line on the Wherry Lines, is the nearest; Reedham is a little further, and the 73A bus serves the village — check current stops and times. Approach by the Acle and Halvergate road rather than expecting a way across the marsh. Strumpshaw Fen, an RSPB reserve of reedbed and orchid meadow with kingfishers and bitterns, makes an easy day out, and the Weavers' Way carries on across Breydon Water to Great Yarmouth, a twelve-mile stretch from Acle, for anyone with it in them.

Back to the Red Lion

Whichever walk you take, it ends the same way: back up the rise, out of the wind, to the fire at the Red Lion.