Wheatacre

Village Tables and Farm Produce

The Wheatacre White Lion sits in two acres of grassland and mature trees, with a bar, a dining room and a beer garden the pub calls spacious. Jay Meades and his team have run it since November 2017. The kitchen makes a point of its Sunday roasts and carefully sourced ingredients, and the bar keeps Adnams Southwold Bitter and Ghost Ship on permanently, with two rotating beers alongside. In 2018 it was named South Norfolk Community Pub of the Year. Dogs are welcome in the bar and outside.

At Wheatacre Hall Farm, the Burroughs family run the Farmhouse Pantry and the Farmhouse Kitchen. The Pantry sells fresh bread and bakery goods, prime meat, fruit and vegetables, frozen food, pet supplies, gifts and dairy from the farm's own cows. In summer you can watch the milking herd grazing. The Kitchen does breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea from local, seasonal produce.

Marshland and Circular Walks

Wheatacre is a scattered settlement on slightly higher ground at the edge of the Waveney Valley marshes. The land around it is open and large in scale: grazing marsh, arable reversion, drainage dykes, carr woodland and flood banks, with long views across the Waveney. The windmills that once drained these marshes have all gone. A derelict steam-engine house still stands with its full-height chimney, a conspicuous vertical landmark.

Two circular walks start in the village. One is a 7.9-mile ramble from the White Lion that passes All Saints, follows farm tracks past the hall and drops into woodland beside flood meadows before looping back along Crimp Cramp Lane. The other, 7.5 miles and about three hours, begins at the church and runs above the wet marshland toward the Waveney River Centre and Burgh St Peter, with river, birds and butterflies along the way. Both can be wet underfoot.

Tower, Bell and Deep History

William White's 1845 directory described All Saints as standing "on an eminence, commanding extensive prospects." The building is mainly 14th-century, with an early-16th-century west tower that Pevsner called handsome — flint and red brick laid in an elaborate chequerboard, the same brickwork carrying on around the west doorway and window. Inside there is a huge chancel arch with smaller arches cut into it, a font whose cover hangs from the ceiling, a gallery, an Italian-marble altar and a single bell dated 1618. It is usually open.

The place is old. Domesday recorded 49 households here in 1086, along with 62 acres of meadow, pasture for 200 sheep and two churches, all valued at four pounds and fifteen shillings a year to the lord, up from three pounds twenty years earlier. The marsh economy that came after ran on grazing, reed cutting for thatch, wildfowling and moving goods out by wherry.

Arriving in Wheatacre

Somerleyton station is about two miles off, on the Greater Anglia line. Otherwise you arrive by narrow lanes, since no A-road runs through the settlement, and bus 86 stops on White Lion Road for Beccles and, on its longer runs, Loddon and Norwich, though not often. Beccles, with its quay and riverside walks, is the nearest town.

A White Lion Welcome

Back at the White Lion, if the pub dog Duke is about, he will make his own introductions.