The tower mill at Sutton runs to nine storeys of brick. It went up in 1789, burned in 1859, and was rebuilt to the same great height. Inside, the brakewheel, windshaft, wallower and spur wheel survive, along with the gear for four pairs of stones. Historic England has it on the Heritage at Risk register, vacant and slowly decaying; the cap has come off for repair, and the owner is working towards putting it back. It is a building you look at rather than into, and there is a lot to look at.
The rest of village life gathers by the water. Sutton Staithe is the end of a boat dyke that runs through Sutton Broad to the River Ant, a working landing since at least 1802, when the enclosure award set it aside for local owners to bring in corn and manure. It is now parish common land with free 24-hour moorings, room for around forty boats, and a slipway you pay to use.
Beside it stands the Sutton Staithe Hotel. The building is more than two hundred years old and was once the Wherryman's Arms, drunk in by the crews of the sailing wherries that carried freight across the Broads. It became the Staithe Hotel and Country Club under a licensee called Basil Hitchin, and Barry Tunmore then held the licence from 1979 to 2020. Today it is a pub, restaurant and eleven-room hotel with a real fire and cask ales, Adnams Southwold Bitter among them. The kitchen changes its menu with the seasons; the Staithe Stack and Staithe Burger are house fixtures, and there is a pan-fried salmon in sticky teriyaki sauce with fragrant rice. Dogs are welcome throughout: they may sleep in any bedroom and sit with you at the bar, at dinner and at breakfast. One recent visitor summed the bar up as "lovely and warm and cosy real fire, friendly staff and good selection of beers, wine, spirits."
The nearest thing to a village shop is Sutton Building Supplies and Garden Centre, a family business going since 1953 that sells plants, sheds and aquatics rather than groceries.
St Michael's, the parish church, is flint and ashlar, mainly early fourteenth century and enlarged a hundred years later. The west tower rises in three unbuttressed stages and the south porch has two storeys. Inside are an octagonal font of the late fourteenth century, a holy-water stoup, a blocked rood stair, a seventeenth-century polygonal pulpit, and chancel stalls whose armrests are carved as heads. The Domesday commissioners found Sutton in Happing hundred with something like twenty households. A detailed entry for Roger Bigot's estate combines Sutton with Brumstead, Catfield, Horsey and Stalham, and its combined value rose from six pounds ten shillings to ten pounds in the twenty years after the Conquest.
Walkers have the run of open country. A circular of just under seven miles links Stalham Staithe, the mill, Hickling Broad and Hickling village before returning to Sutton, mostly on lanes and footpaths. Hickling Broad itself is a six-hundred-hectare Norfolk Wildlife Trust reserve of reedbed, woodland and open water, where the patient might see a swallowtail butterfly, a bittern, a crane or a marsh harrier. On the water, the canoe trails from Wayford Bridge run down to Sutton Staithe and back, anything from a couple of miles to ten. Stalham has the Museum of the Broads, and Sea Palling's sandy beach is within reach along the coast.
The village sits just off the A149. Sanders buses on the 6, 6A and X6 stop at Elmhurst Avenue on the run between Cromer, North Walsham, Stalham and Great Yarmouth, and the 34 links Sutton with Hickling, Sea Palling and Mundesley.
For two summers Sutton even had its own station. Sutton Staithe Halt opened in July 1933 to bring Broads holidaymakers to the water; its platform was made of sleepers, and passengers climbed down from the railcar on steps that folded out. It closed again in July 1935.
The pond in the middle of the village was dug by residents in the 1970s, and a settled population of ducks has had it to themselves ever since.