The Chequers Inn on Front Street is the only pub in Binham, a 17th-century brick-and-flint place with an old-fashioned bar, a Gallery extension, and a paved terrace out front. Five cask ales rotate across the pumps, usually including Moon Gazer as the local, alongside the likes of Green Jack, Oakham and Woodforde's, with Whin Hill cider on too. There's darts, pool, and live music now and then.
The kitchen builds its menu on seasonal produce — meat from a butcher in Holt, fish off the North Norfolk coast — with a specials board and regular themed evenings. CAMRA calls it "a tremendously popular place with both locals and visitors." A reviewer named Andrew B put it more directly: "Great find! Very decent value, fantastic food and wonderful service. You can see the effort the owners are making."
The village shop doubles as a petrol station, which is more than most villages this size manage.
Binham also has a cheese named after it, though the cheese is made a short drive away at Copys Green Farm in Wighton. Binham Blue is a handmade blue from Dr Catherine Temple, worked from the milk of her own Brown Swiss cattle, with a creamy texture and a sweet, tangy edge closer to a continental blue than a Stilton. Her dairy, Mrs Temple's Cheese, won the Field to Fork category at the 2024 Norfolk food and drink awards, and turns up in delis and pubs across the county.
The heart of the village is a wide triangular green with a 15th-century market cross on it, made of Barnack limestone on a flint plinth and one of the best surviving medieval standing crosses in Norfolk. The original cross-head is gone, probably knocked off during 16th- or 17th-century iconoclasm. Henry I granted the monks a weekly market and an annual fair here in the early 12th century; the fairs ran on the green until the early 1950s, then stopped.
Just outside the village stand the grey flint ruins of Binham Priory, the surviving nave still in use as the parish church of St Mary and the Holy Cross. Construction began in the 1090s and ran close to 150 years. The west front, from around 1245, holds what is described as the earliest example of Gothic bar tracery in England. Inside, four painted panels of the old rood screen survive. At the Reformation the saints' faces were scratched out, whitewashed, and overwritten with biblical text in heavy black lettering. The whitewash has faded since, and the saints are ghosting back through the words that were meant to replace them.
Walk south-east and the lane climbs to Fiddler's Hill, a Bronze Age barrow at a crossroads, now a picnic spot under short turf. Legend has it a fiddler called Jimmy Griggs walked an underground passage from the priory playing as he went, with his dog Trap; halfway along the music stopped and he was never seen again. When the mound was cut into for road-widening in 1933, they found three skeletons and the bones of a dog.
Nearest trains are at Sheringham on the Bittern Line; the roads are country lanes, with Wells-next-the-Sea about five miles away. From Fiddler's Hill you can carry on across the fields to Walsingham, or just sit on the green and watch the light move over the arable.
