The cottages at New Houghton stand in a matched terrace, whitewashed and identical, lining the approach to a pair of gates. There are thirty-three of them, all Grade II listed, and they face the Hall across open parkland. This is the whole village. No pub, no shop, and by 2021 fewer than a hundred people, at which point the parish was quietly absorbed into West Rudham.
Grazing that parkland is the largest herd of white fallow deer in the country — somewhere between 350 and several hundred, depending on who is counting. They were bred up by the 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley from the late nineteenth century. KL Magazine calls them "something of a Victorian vanity, possibly to reflect Houghton's white cottages." Someone, in other words, matched the deer to the houses.
The reason most people come is Houghton Hall, at the gates. Walpole built it between 1722 and 1735, Neo-Palladian, with interiors by William Kent and a park laid out by Charles Bridgeman. The walled garden runs to five acres — a double herbaceous border, a rose parterre, apple and pear arches in the kitchen garden.
There is also a sculpture park, with permanent works by Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Richard Long and others, and a James Turrell Skyspace installed in 2000. Recent summers have brought Damien Hirst, Henry Moore and Anish Kapoor out onto the grass.
For a pub you drive. The Crown Inn at East Rudham, about three miles off, sits at the head of the green in a building that goes back to the 1700s. The kitchen does curries, steaks, pasta and homemade burgers, cooked to order and sourced locally, and dogs are welcome. The Rose & Crown at Harpley usually keeps five real ales on and was once West Norfolk's CAMRA Pub of the Year. The Duke's Head, also at East Rudham, specialises in Chinese food, which is not what you expect from a Norfolk village pub.
The walking is good. A 4.7-mile circular starts where the Peddars Way crosses the Anmer Road, at a triangle of grass, and runs through fields and mixed woodland — chestnut, beech, pine, sycamore — past the white lodge gates and a large barn. The estate is scattered with Bronze Age burial mounds, some of them three and a half thousand years old. The Peddars Way itself, the 46-mile trail from Suffolk to the Norfolk coast, passes just west of the village through the chalk hills at Harpley.
St Martin's church stands alone in the deer park, which is where the old village used to be. When Walpole redesigned his grounds in the 1720s he had the medieval village demolished and rebuilt at the gates, leaving only the church where it was. It holds his tomb, his two wives' and his brother's, monuments to three Earls of Orford — one of them the writer Horace Walpole — and a memorial to the crew of a Lancaster bomber that came down nearby in October 1944. Services are held only in summer, when the estate is open.
Somewhere in the gardens is the Sybil Hedge, a folly clipped into the shape of Sybil Sassoon's signature. She married into the family in 1913 and spent decades restoring the place. Her name is still there, in box, if you know where to look.
