Holme-next-the-Sea

The pub with its own bakery

The White Horse keeps its own bakery, open eight till four every day, and in its first year it was named one of the top fifty in the UK. It's a Grade II listed gastropub run by Anglian Country Inns, the group behind the better-known White Horse at Brancaster Staithe, and the menus change with the seasons: Cromer crab crumpets, whole grilled plaice with tartare butter sauce, Brancaster mussels in a creamy white wine sauce, cod cheek scampi with buttermilk and chilli. Thursday is curry night, pig cheek rogan josh and monkfish Keralan curry. The head chef, Gabe, sources personally from suppliers like Woodlands Farm at Swannington.

Dogs are welcome throughout the pub and bar, and there's a heated outdoor deck. The one recurring complaint is that some mains feel small unless you pay for the sides, though nobody says that about the Sunday roasts.

A small village with a big coast

It placed 31st in the Good Food Guide's hundred best pubs for 2025, which is a lot of ranking for a village of 203 people.

That number keeps mattering here. Holme is small and getting smaller, 239 at the 2011 census, 203 at the last one. It sits on the north-west elbow of the Norfolk coast where The Wash meets the North Sea, two and a half miles up from Hunstanton: dunes, pinewoods, grazing marsh and pools behind a wide beach, with the little River Hun, a chalk stream, threading down to the shore.

Where the trail meets Seahenge

This is where the Peddars Way ends. The old chalk ridgeway, billed as Britain's oldest highway, runs up from Thetford Forest and meets the Norfolk Coast Path right at the sea. From the dunes you can strike east toward Thornham and Brancaster, or turn inland and walk south. Holme Dunes, a national nature reserve, has boardwalks through the pools and a visitor centre; in autumn it fills with migrating birds.

The beach is also where Seahenge turned up. In spring 1998 an amateur archaeologist, John Lorimer, spotted a ring of timber posts that wave erosion had uncovered: 55 split oak posts around a central oak stump buried upside-down, roots in the air, built in 2049 BC. The timbers now sit indoors at the Lynn Museum in King's Lynn. Not everyone wanted them moved. "This is 60 grand being spent by archaeologists who are patting each other on the back," one protester said at the time. A second ring, Holme II, was found a hundred metres away, dated to the very same year. That one was left where it was, and shows itself only at the lowest tides.

The shortened church and the road out

St Mary's, up inland, has a 76-foot Perpendicular tower and not much else of its medieval self. The nave and aisles went so ruinous that in 1777 the vestry resolved to pull them down, and a smaller rebuild followed the next year. Inside there's a memorial to Richard Stone, who died in 1607 having "lyved in wedlock joyfully togeether 64 years."

The Lynx Coastliner 36 stops at the crossroads about once an hour, seven days a week, running down to King's Lynn and along the coast. King's Lynn is the nearest station, fifteen miles off.

The day the gardens open

Early in July the village opens its gardens for the day, with plant stalls and refreshments, which for a place this size is most of it turning out at once.