Herringfleet

The Mill and the Marsh

Herringfleet Marsh Mill stands out on the wet ground, a black-weatherboarded smock windpump built around 1820 to drain the marshes, probably by Barnes of Yarmouth. Its scoopwheel shaft carries an inscription: W.T. ENGLAND. MILLWRIGHT. YARMOUTH 1910. Historic England calls it the last full-size smock drainage mill in the Broads. You reach it only on foot, by a footpath off the B1074 about half a mile from a small roadside car park, and the walk out gives you marsh views and a sightline towards the Somerleyton swing bridge.

This is a dispersed hamlet rather than a village with a centre. The River Waveney forms its western edge, and the marshland decides where anyone can build, so what you get is a scattering of farms, an isolated church, and a low acid-grassland rise called Herringfleet Hills that lifts clear of the wetland around it.

Hills, Wildlife and Ancient Stone

The Herringfleet Hills Walk is a roughly three-mile circular from the Hills car park, crossing grass heath, bracken, scrub, woodland and cattle-grazed marsh. Snipe, lapwing and redshank use the wet ground; grass snakes and common lizards turn up in the drier parts, and water soldier grows in the dykes. Dogs are welcome on leads.

St Margaret's Church sits on a rise above the road with, as Simon Knott put it, "just a farm for company." Its round west tower is no later than the eleventh century, the nave and porch are thatched, and the south doorway is a twelfth-century Norman arch carved with chevrons. Inside there is an early-nineteenth-century west gallery, monuments and three hatchments to the Leathes family, and an east window set with painted-glass fragments brought largely from Cologne, dated between the late fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries. The stone used to repair the church in 1823 came from the ruins of St Olave's Priory.

Food, Gardens and Priory Ruins

Herringfleet has no pub of its own now. An inn recorded as the Bell Inn in 1844 and 1891, and later as the Bell Hotel and the Cromwell Hotel by 1912, stood here when St Olaves still counted as part of the parish, before a 1974 boundary change sent St Olaves across into Norfolk. For a drink and a meal the nearest is the Duke's Head at Somerleyton, a gastro-pub looking out over the Waveney marshes. The kitchen, under Sean Toy, has recently featured fish and chips, seabass fillet, sirloin steak and sticky toffee pudding, though pub menus shift with the seasons. Adnams Southwold Bitter is the regular ale, with changing beers from Grain, Green Jack and Lacons. There is a spacious beer garden, and dogs are welcome.

Somerleyton also holds the nearest post office, at the Old Garage on The Street, and the tea room at Somerleyton Hall, which does sausage rolls, cheese scones, cream teas and cakes. The hall's gardens run to twelve acres, with a walled garden, an arboretum and a yew maze. The priory whose stone patched the church is worth the short trip to St Olaves, where the ruins are free to enter and a fourteenth-century brick-vaulted undercroft survives almost complete.

Getting There and the Name's Origins

The nearest station is Somerleyton, an unstaffed stop about a mile away on the Norwich–Lowestoft line, with step-free access to both platforms. The roads in are narrow: the B1074 links St Olaves and Somerleyton, and the Borderbus 580 stops at St Olaves rather than in Herringfleet itself.

The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Herlingaflet, with a small number of households and woodland enough for twelve pigs. The name has nothing to do with herring; it means the stream of Herela's people.

The Mill Today

The Broads Authority approved repair work to the mill's structure and sails in 2024, though that approval is not the same as the work being finished. Don't assume the sails will be turning on the day you visit — it's worth checking locally before you go. What you can count on is the walk out to it across the marsh, and how quiet it is once you arrive.