Great Bircham

Flour, food and the five-storey climb

Bircham Windmill still grinds flour, and the bakery beside it turns that flour into bread, scones and cakes you can eat in the tea rooms from nine in the morning. It's a five-storey climb to the gallery, where the view runs out over open arable fields in every direction. Entry to the bakery, tea rooms, gallery and gift shop is free. If you'd rather make your own loaf, there's a "Bake a loaf from scratch" session for that.

The mill is the only working windmill in western Norfolk open to the public, and it very nearly wasn't there at all. The sails and fantail were stripped off by 1934, and it sat derelict until Roger Wagg bought it back from Queen Elizabeth II in May 1976 — his great-grandfather Joseph Wagg had been the miller in the 1880s. Wagg restored it; since 2006 it's been run by his daughter Elly and her husband Stevie. "I love the sounds of the cogs turning," Elly says, which is a reasonable thing to say about a machine your family spent decades putting back together.

A mill restored through one family

Around the mill there's a children's farm with donkeys, pygmy goats, sheep, chickens and guinea pigs, goat-feeding dispensers, a sandpit and cycle hire. You can also stay on-site, in Apple Tree Cottage, a shepherd's hut or the campsite.

The Kings Head, on Lynn Road, has been looking after travellers for the best part of 500 years — there's been an inn on the site since 1600, and the present building was rebuilt in 1860. It's a country hotel now, twelve rooms, Edwardian house with a contemporary interior inside. The kitchen leans on local produce: dressed Cromer crab with dill mayo, Cromer mussels, Norfolk steaks, beer-battered haddock, and pasta like the Kings Head carbonara. Woodforde's Wherry is the regular cask ale, and it's turned up in the Good Beer Guide. Reviews single out generous portions and a welcome extended to dogs as readily as to people.

Five centuries at the Kings Head

For everyday shopping there's the Great Bircham Farm Shop and deli, the village's local food stop.

St Mary the Virgin sits above all this, Grade I listed, with a Norman tower from around 1200 and a 13th-century Purbeck marble font. The 15th-century screen survives; the box pews date from 1850 and are decorated with poppyheads. Around 1480 Roger Le Strange gave the church a crimson cope, which it sold in 1939 to pay for repairs.

A Norman tower and the long road through Fring

The countryside is the other reason to be here. The Great Bircham and Fring circular is 8.4 miles, starting from the Social Club on Church Lane, looping through the hamlet of Fring and following a stretch of the Peddars Way — a former Roman road — back past the windmill. Sandringham sits under a mile from the estate edge; Hunstanton and its striped cliffs are about ten miles off.

There's no station; King's Lynn is twelve miles or so, reached by minor roads off the A148, with buses serving the area from King's Lynn and Fakenham. Docking, two miles north, is the nearest place for anything larger.

No station, and a parish folded away

The parish itself was abolished in 1935 and folded into Bircham. The population, last counted separately in 1931, was 327.