The water at Salhouse Broad was made by men digging gravel, not cutting peat, which sets it slightly apart from the broads around it. From the Lower Street car park it is about ten minutes on foot through mature woodland to the reed-fringed edge, where you can hire a canoe or a kayak, take a paddleboard out, or pitch a tent on the off-grid camping ground. Dogs are welcome on the water under close control. Opposite the broad, a canoe jetty is the only way to reach the Hoveton Great Broad Nature Trail, a kilometre-long circuit through wet woodland reached only by boat from Salhouse Broad, with no dogs allowed except assistance dogs.
Back in the village, two pubs serve food and drink. The Stag occupies a beamed building around four hundred years old, with two bars, a real fire and a dartboard. It traded as the Bell Inn until a refurbishment and renaming in June 2023; the former Bell Inn appears in licensing records from 1789. Lester and Katie Bayfield run it now, and head chef Ross cooks fish and chips, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, steak and a chicken Caesar salad, with tapas on Thursdays and roasts on Sundays. Two cask beers change on the bar, usually something from Sharp's or Timothy Taylor. Dogs are welcome, and there is a large garden at the back.
The Lodge sits in seven acres of parkland in a nineteenth-century former vicarage, run by Matthew and Nicola Colchester, with six bedrooms if you want to stay above the food. The kitchen is more ambitious: grilled local skate with lemon-and-caper butter, a pie of fresh and smoked fish, crab and shrimp arancini, a twice-baked leek and goat's-cheese soufflé, venison with blackberry and red-wine jus, a Thai lamb massaman curry. The building was once the Old Rectory, and parts of it are a medieval parish barn that was taken down at Wroxham and moved here.
For daytime supplies, the Salhouse Farm Shop and Café stands at Black Barn Farm, with a butchery counter, a deli, and Norfolk jams, honey, cheese and vegetables. The café is upstairs, looking out over the fields; breakfast runs to butcher's sausages and deli bacon in baps made from Easters Bakery bread. Dogs get their own menu.
All Saints' Church is Grade I, mostly fourteenth-century flint under a thatched roof, its squat west tower probably never completed. Inside there is a five-bay arcade, carved heads and foliage, a sixteenth-century panelled pulpit with a stand for an hourglass, poppy-head bench ends and two grave slabs likely cut in the twelfth century. The octagonal font was brought over from Woodbastwick.
The parish is not named in Domesday at all, an odd gap for a place this old; the reason is unknown, though it may have been included, unnamed, in a neighbouring manor. The name is Old English for the sallow willows that grew here. During the Second World War a boat was sunk in the broad on purpose, to stop enemy seaplanes landing; it still showed on aerial photographs decades later.
Salhouse has its own station on the Bittern Line between Norwich and Sheringham, unstaffed, with six parking spaces and no ticket machine. The broad is a good three-quarters of an hour's walk from the platform, so the Lower Street car park is the easier arrival. Norwich is six miles southwest by road and Wroxham two miles north; the Konectbus route 2 stops at The Stag, though it is worth checking the times before you count on it. Ten minutes on foot the other way brings you to Woodbastwick, with its thatched well house and Woodforde's brewery shop.
The nature trail across the water exists because of Dr Martin George, who found a patch of untouched alder carr and argued for letting people see it. Staff laid the boardwalk two railway sleepers at a time, carrying them on a homemade cart, and opened it in 1969.