East Rudham

The Rudhams' surviving pub

The Crown Inn sits at the head of the green, six bedrooms above a bar with beamed ceilings and an open fire. The kitchen changes its menu weekly and runs a specials board daily: a homemade rump burger at £18.95, a spiced sweet potato, chestnut and mushroom seeded kofta at £21, pan-roasted cannon of lamb, a 10oz sirloin that will cost you £39.95. There are Sunday roasts, a children's menu, and a night given over to pizza, pasta and prosecco. It ranks first of two inns in the village on TripAdvisor, a smaller field than it sounds, and one reviewer's labradors "use it like a second home now."

It is also, now, the only pub the Rudhams have. The Duke's Head over in West Rudham — a carstone building with a brick lozenge dated 1663 — spent its later years as a Chinese and Thai restaurant until its operators retired in November 2025 after twenty-two years. Plans are in to turn it into a house.

One community along the common

East Rudham and West Rudham work as one place, strung along a broad common. East Rudham has the green and the Crown; West Rudham has the school, the village hall and the former Duke's Head. Locals call them, collectively, the Rudhams. There is a village store with a tea room, and the wider area keeps a scattering of farm shops within a short drive.

You arrive on the A148, the King's Lynn to Fakenham road, and drop down into a wide open green fronted by the inn and a row of period cottages. King's Lynn is about fourteen miles south-west; the village's own railway station opened in 1880 and closed in 1959, so the nearest trains now run from Lynn. The Lynx 49 bus comes through roughly every two hours.

Roman ground and medieval stone

The green is worth standing on for a moment, because underneath it is a Roman settlement — coins, brooches, pottery, a possible Roman road, all centred on the open ground where the summer festival now pitches its stalls. That festival is a joint East-and-West affair over two days in July, and its programme includes a horticultural show, donkey rides, a male beauty contest and a sheep race.

St Mary's was largely rebuilt in 1876 after its west tower fell into the nave, but older work survives in the chancel and the south transept. Its altar stone is the reason people come. Pevsner thought the mensa twelfth century, possibly earlier, which would make it the oldest surviving example in East Anglia. An antiquary spotted it, and it was restored to its rightful place in the 1980s.

Coxford ruins and walking loops

East at Coxford are the earthwork remains of an Augustinian priory founded near here around 1140 and moved to Coxford about 1216, where it became one of the wealthiest religious houses in Norfolk before the Dissolution. The fishponds are still legible in the ground.

Walks lead out from the green in loops — north to Coxford Heath, east past Coxford and Broomsthorpe, west and back — on farm tracks that run alongside the River Tat. The Peddars Way passes close by.

The decoy on Coxford Heath

On Coxford Heath during the war there was a decoy site, lit up at night to draw Luftwaffe bombers away from King's Lynn. It worked by pretending to be somewhere more important than a field.