Brancaster

Two pubs beside the marsh

At the Jolly Sailors in Brancaster Staithe the beer is grown down the road. Brancaster Brewery runs out of the pub itself, brewer Mark Riches working to the pub's own recipes with Maris Otter barley from Branthill Farm, so the malt barely travels. It's the family-and-dog pub of the three settlements strung along the A149, and the menu runs to homemade steak and ale pie, beer-battered fish and chips, a Jolly chicken curry, fourteen-hour smoked pulled pork, and Tom's Brancaster mussels in season. One TripAdvisor reviewer called it "my favourite dog friendly pub in Norfolk". There are blankets and treats for the dogs, and a beer garden for everyone else.

A little along the marsh is the White Horse, a gastropub, seafood restaurant and hotel all at once, with two AA Rosettes and a menu built around whatever the village fishermen land. The Nye family bought it run-down in 1994, when it was called the Lobster Pot and a caravan park sat where the car park is now. The conservatory and terrace look over the tidal marsh, which visitors keep calling one of the best views on the coast.

Shellfish, sand and a wartime wreck

The mussels are not heritage. Tom Large comes from a long line of Brancaster fishermen and still rakes them by hand from the shallow creeks with his partner Sarah, harvesting between October and March. Cyril and Ben Southerland, father and son, farm oysters and mussels in the harbour. Gurney's Fish Shop began as a ten-square-foot room known as the Hole in the Wall, the first fishmonger on the coast road, and now runs the deli inside the refurbished village hall.

Brancaster Beach is vast sand and dunes, and it comes with a warning. Blackened posts stand out at low tide: the SS Vina, a coaster bought by the Ministry of War in 1944 for RAF bombing practice and left to sink at the harbour mouth. The tide races in fast enough that the wreck is a real drowning hazard. A submerged forest, compacted to something like peat, surfaces on the same beach when the water drops.

A coast governed by the tide

Everything runs on the tide here. At high water the Royal West Norfolk Golf Club, founded 1892 and reached across a causeway the sea washes over, becomes an island and can't be reached.

The Norfolk Coast Path runs straight through the parish along the marsh edge. The Brancaster Staithe Circular loops nearly five miles over Barrow Common, past the site of the Roman fort of Branodunum and the Vina wreck, with brent geese and oystercatchers for company.

Roman stone and the lost railway

St Mary's church reused Roman stone to block two Norman windows, and keeps a 1493 font cover carved to fold up like a telescope and a diamond-shaped wooden clock for timing sermons.

The railway closed in 1969 and never came back; the nearest working station is King's Lynn, twenty-two miles south, and the Lynx Coastliner 36 stops outside the Jolly Sailors seven days a week.

Sundial over the harbour

Opposite the sailing club stands the Dial House, a 17th-century flint house with Dutch gables and a large sundial over the porch. It was once a pub called the Victory, then home to the wardens who watched over the birds on Scolt Head Island. On summer weekends the harbour fills with boats racing round the island and back.