The Fox & Hounds on Station Road has a micro-brewery next door, which is how it comes to keep eight beers on, including a session golden ale called Heacham Gold. The landlord cooks the food himself: steak and ale pie, pork with creamy mushrooms, Sunday lunches. Reviewers call it unspoilt. They're more divided on the landlord's manner, which tends to happen when one person is doing everything. Tuesday nights are mostly blues; the quiz is on Thursday.
The Bushel & Strike, over on Malthouse Crescent, does a Sunday carvery with rotating meats and serves food six days a week, closed Mondays. It has a pool table, a dartboard and a stated dog policy: "Dogs are always welcome, as long as they look after their owners." The building started life as a beer house in the late 1800s and didn't get a full licence until 1955.
There are more pubs too — one in the village proper, one on Hunstanton Road, and one down near the seafront. For food to take home, the Norfolk Lavender farm shop at Caley Mill has a butcher's counter, a deli, fruit and veg, and a tea room in the old miller's cottage. Breakfast and Brownies bakes on the High Street. On Wednesday evenings Bordoli's pizza truck turns up.
Heacham's beach faces west, which is unusual on the east coast, and the upshot is sunsets over the sea — across The Wash to Lincolnshire. A local photographer captions it "Looking west to the east coast!"
The Norfolk Coast Path runs straight through, between Hunstanton and King's Lynn. Walk south to Snettisham along the beach, or in bad weather along the tops of the sea defences a few hundred metres inland; either way you pass the Wild Ken Hill estate, where they film Springwatch. The full loop out to the RSPB reserve at Snettisham is about nine miles. The reserve is known for its waders — knot, dunlin, oystercatchers — lifting off the mud en masse as the tide pushes them in.
The recreation ground has a boating lake, a maze, a miniature railway, mini golf and a skate park, which is a lot of ground to cover.
St Mary the Virgin has a central tower, which is rare in Norfolk because flint makes a poor base for one. It's built partly of carstone, "a soft honey-coloured sandstone which hardens with age." Until September 2024 it held a bell cast around 1150 — Norfolk's oldest, and reportedly England's seventh — now kept inside and brought out for special occasions.
There is also, inside, an alabaster relief of Pocahontas. John Rolfe, her husband, was born in Heacham, and in 1616 he brought her and their young son to Heacham Hall; she died at Gravesend the following year. The village sign is a portrait of her.
The A149 links Hunstanton and King's Lynn through the village, with frequent Lynx buses between the two. The railway closed in 1969; the nearest station now is King's Lynn, fourteen miles off, on the line to Cambridge and London.
Norfolk Lavender was planted at Caley Mill in 1932 — the first 13,000 plants across six acres, done by three men and a boy in eighteen days, for fifteen pounds. It's still there. So, opposite, is Ruby the dog.
