The village pump on the green is cast iron, made by Ransome and Sims in 1859. Around it stand ornate red-brick estate cottages, a school, a pond and the building that was once the shop and post office. Nothing here happened by accident. The green is framed by surviving Victorian estate buildings, built together in the middle of the nineteenth century.
The pub is the Duke's Head, on Slugs Lane, with a wood burner and a spacious beer garden. It calls itself a gastropub and cooks a seasonal menu under head chef Sean Toy. The children's list gives a fair sense of the kitchen: flounder fish fingers with chips and garden peas, the Duke's cheeseburger, pigs in blankets, Alburgh ice cream and a dark-chocolate mousse from Pump Street Bakery. There is cask ale, and dogs are welcome.
For daytime food, the tea room inside Somerleyton Hall changes what it offers day to day and runs to sausage rolls, toasties, cheese scones, cream teas, cakes and pastries. There is no village grocery. The old shop and post office closed some years ago, and what remains is a limited outreach post office counter at the Old Garage.
The hall gardens cover twelve acres and are the reason most people come. There is a yew maze planted in 1846, a sunken White Garden, a restored parterre laid out by Nesfield, an arboretum and a walled garden. Beyond them the parkland has been left to rewild, and free-roaming cattle, wild ponies and deer graze across the old park. Hugh Crossley, the fourth Baron Somerleyton, put it this way: "The park was a fake 'wilderness' in the 19th century. In the modern context of rewilding, it now truly looks as it was designed to look." The hall itself stood in for Sandringham in the fourth series of The Crown, which took twelve days of packing away furnishings and repainting walls for three days of filming.
The estate came together under Sir Samuel Morton Peto, who bought it in 1844 and had the architect John Thomas rebuild the hall, the church and the cottages. Peto had started as a bricklayer and risen to build parts of the Houses of Parliament and Nelson's Column. His firm failed in the 1860s, and the estate passed to Sir Francis Crossley, a carpet manufacturer.
The church of St Mary keeps its fifteenth-century west tower; John Thomas rebuilt the rest in 1854. Inside there is an octagonal font carved with alternating lions and shield-bearing angels, a rood screen with painted dado panels, mostly saints, and the 1446 tomb chest of Sir Thomas Gernegan. Two panels of fourteenth-century Flemish glass came from the priory at St Olaves.
Walking is the main outdoor draw. A seven-mile circular runs on flat farm tracks past the hall to Lound and back along the Angles Way; a longer, harder eight-mile route from the station reaches the round-towered church at Ashby and the ruins of the old brickworks. Somerleyton station sits about half a mile out, on the Wherry Lines toward Norwich and Lowestoft, with eight free parking spaces and a step-free platform. The B1074 carries cars toward Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth. There is no regular bus service.
The brickworks shipped its cargo out along Wherry Dyke until it closed in 1939. Christopher Cockerell tested the idea that became the hovercraft here, using two coffee tins and a vacuum-cleaner fan. A twenty-foot column in the village, unveiled by his daughter Frances, carries a small bronze hovercraft on top.