The waterside pub sits beside Hickling Staithe, with customer moorings outside. The kitchen runs to prawn and crayfish cocktail, a Swannington beef burger, handmade steak and ale pie, Pell & Co beer-battered haddock and sticky toffee pudding, with chicken and beef roasts on Sundays. One recent visitor, Mike S, called it "rustic, rather than posh," which is about the size of it. The Norfolk Wildlife Trust owns the building and leases it to Rick and Felicity Malt, who reopened it in August 2024 after the pub had stood closed for nearly two years.
Dogs are allowed everywhere here, including at the table while you eat, and the staff will bring a bowl and a treat. The free customer moorings are good for up to 48 hours if you have arrived by water.
The village's other pub, the Greyhound, stands on The Green in the centre, a more traditional room with a log fire. It does Cromer crab in season and Sunday roasts, and it welcomes dogs and has a garden.
The old village shop has closed. There is a Post Office at the Methodist Chapel on Heath Road, and the Wildlife Trust visitor centre sells binoculars, books, cards and wildlife gifts alongside hot drinks and light refreshments.
What brings most people to Hickling is the Broad, the largest of all the Broads. The reserve runs to 600 hectares of reedbed, grazing marsh, fen and woodland, laced with boardwalk and grass paths, raised banks and hides looking out over open water. This is swallowtail country, along with Norfolk hawker dragonflies, bitterns, marsh harriers and, in recent years, common cranes; reed cutting still goes on both for thatch and for the birds. Only assistance dogs are permitted on the reserve itself, so the family spaniel stays with the pub.
The Trust runs guided trips aboard two twelve-seat electric boats, Swallowtail and Damselfly, on a two-hour route into parts of the reserve you cannot reach on foot, taking in remote hides and a sixty-foot tree tower. On land, Weavers' Way heads off towards Potter Heigham, a 5.8-mile walk that crosses grazing marsh and a flood bank beside the Broad before following the River Thurne past High's Drainage Mill to the medieval bridge.
St Mary's church is worth a walk inland from the water. Flint with ashlar dressings, a ninety-foot tower dressed in flushwork, a fourteenth-century octagonal font, and a medieval coffin lid for a woman named Rosa, whose heart alone was buried beneath it. A chest tomb attributed to Sir William Wodehouse carries three centuries of graffiti, including a "Roundehead 1645" and a scratched Nine Men's Morris board. Its five bells are among the heaviest rings of five in the country.
Hickling has been settled a long time. An Augustinian priory was founded here in 1185, and in December 1287 a storm flood rose more than a foot above its high altar. The tower mill of 1818 climbed eight storeys, with thirteen of its upper windows built false so the real ones did not weaken the tower.
Worstead is the nearest railway station; the Sanders 34 bus calls at the Methodist Church on its way between Stalham and North Walsham. Horsey and its grey seals, the Museum of the Broads at Stalham and the red-and-white lighthouse at Happisburgh are all nearby by car.
For years a man called Alfred Nudd, known as Mate, lived blind in a hut beside the Broad and drank at the Pleasure Boat for three-quarters of a century. On his eighty-sixth birthday the regulars gave him whisky, a radio and a cake.