Castle Acre

Through the Bailey Gate

You arrive through a gate. The Bailey Gate is a Norman gatehouse, one of three the de Warennes built, and it still stands intact across the road — so you drive through it to get to the village, which is not the arrangement most Norfolk villages offer. Beyond it the streets are flint and brick set around greens, and the ground rises to a hundred-foot mound of grass earthworks that used to be a castle.

The Ostrich sits on the green and is now the only pub left in the village. Castle Acre once had around a dozen — the Chequers, the Drum & Monkey, the Dun Cow, the Frog in a Jar, the Rampant Horse — and all of them are gone except this one. It's a 16th-century coaching inn, Grade II listed, with three wood-burning stoves and six rooms upstairs. Greene King on the taps. The menu is seasonal pub cooking with a lot of it adaptable for vegetarians, and there are quiz nights and the occasional sea shanty evening. When Aoife Halliday and Ant Ciavarella took it over in 2021 she said they wanted "a place where everyone is welcome," which for the last pub standing feels like the right ambition.

The Last Pub and Village Provisions

For coffee and a cake there is Wittles, on the site of the old Barnfields café, which the Barnfields ran for about fifteen years. "Wittles" is Norfolk for vittles, meaning food. A TripAdvisor reviewer called it "a perfect little village tea shop," which it is. There is also an antiques and secondhand bookshop.

The church is St James the Great, flint-built and Grade I listed, mostly 14th and 15th century. Two things repay a look. The font cover is a tall telescopic Perpendicular spire that still uses its original 15th-century lifting gear, its red, green and gold paint recovered in restoration, a dove on top. And the wineglass pulpit is painted with the four Latin Doctors of the Church and carries damage said to be from firearms — someone, at some point, shot at it.

A Junction for Walkers

Walkers have a genuine junction here. The Peddars Way, the arrow-straight Roman road, runs directly through the village, and the Nar Valley Way crosses it at the same point. The castle was built precisely where the two meet the river. A good circular of about six and a half miles takes the Peddars Way and old drove roads out and the River Nar back, through South Acre and the sandy Petticoat Drove and across duckboards over the reedbeds of Castle Acre Common. The Nar valley is a Site of Special Scientific Interest — meadowsweet, yellow rattle, marsh.

Castle, Bailey Gate and Priory

The castle earthworks and the Bailey Gate are free English Heritage sites, open year-round, and children can run about on the ramparts. The Priory is a short walk on, its Norman west front finished in the 1160s and reckoned one of the finest in England, with a recreated medieval herb garden.

Arrival, Fairs and the Ostrich

The village is four miles north of Swaffham off the A1065; the nearest stations are King's Lynn and Downham Market, both fifteen miles west, and the 32 bus stops at Budgens. Once, the profits of the Castle Acre fairs were leased out with the Ostrich, along with a field called Dunstans Meadow. The fairs are gone. The pub is still there.