Cley-next-the-Sea

Smoke, clay and High Street browsing

The Cley Smokehouse has been smoking fish on the High Street for over forty-five years, using no artificial colours or dyes, and it lands its own lobster and Cromer crab from its own boat. You can buy kippers, smoked salmon, dressed crab and home-made pâté, and if you want more of the same there's a second deli and café two miles down the road in Glandford. A few doors along, Picnic Fayre sells local cheeses, wines and baked goods out of a converted forge, which is the shop to raid before you walk the marshes.

The village runs along a narrow High Street between salt marsh and reedbed, near the mouth of the River Glaven. Made in Cley is a working pottery shared by around ten artists, throwing stoneware on site; Pinkfoot Gallery hangs oil paintings and prints; there's a bookshop and tea shops besides. For a place with a population of 401, it keeps a lot of things open.

Two pubs, two village settings

The George and Dragon sits in the heart of it, an imposing 18th-century inn that had closed and reopened, which the East Anglian Daily Times called "the once-closed pub now making waves on the Norfolk coast." Food runs all day, every day — venison ragù, fish and chips, sticky toffee pudding, year-round Sunday roasts — and there's Woodforde's Wherry on regularly. Dogs are welcome throughout. The large beer garden is across the narrow High Street from the pub, which becomes a matter of some concern to summer traffic.

The Three Swallows stands over at Newgate, in front of the parish church and the village green, with views across the Glaven Valley. Wood-fired pizzas and small plates now, from an outdoor oven added in 2022, alongside the usual blackboard specials. Its bar front is 400 years old, made from furniture salvaged from a Dutch ship. The garden has a play area, an ornamental pond and an aviary.

A church and a vanished port

St Margaret of Antioch is Grade I listed and mostly early 14th century, built for the mercantile de Vaux family before the Black Death arrived in 1349 and the work simply stopped. It never fully restarted. The ruined south transept still carries particularly opulent window tracery, and there's a Seven Sacrament font, the kind found almost only in East Anglia.

Cley was once one of the busiest ports in England, shipping wool and grain out to the Low Countries — hence the Flemish gables you keep noticing. It has not been next the sea since the 17th century, when land reclamation and an ill-fated dam silted up the Glaven. The Customs House closed in 1853.

The mill on the old harbour line

The five-storey tower windmill still marks the old harbour line, and is where James Blunt spent much of his childhood; his father owned it before the family sold up in 2005. It's a hotel now.

The marsh circuit and its sanctuary

The Cley–Wiveton–Blakeney circular is about seven and a half miles of sea walls and rights of way, crossing the ancient Wiveton Bridge. In 1926 Dr Sydney Long bought the marsh here for £5,100, to hold "in perpetuity as a bird breeding sanctuary." The birdwatchers still come, and the George caters to them by name.