Ringstead

The Inn and Its Gin

In 1973 the owners of the village pub hung animal gin traps over the walls and ceiling and renamed the place after them. It had been The Compasses Inn until then, and had been serving drinks since 1668, but The Gin Trap Inn was the name that stuck. The traps came down when it reopened at Easter 2015 and the pub pivoted to gin instead, and it now keeps 130-plus varieties, tasting boards and the occasional gin festival. The name outlived the traps.

It is a 17th-century whitewashed coaching inn with a fireplace, alcove tables and a courtyard garden, and the food has ambitions. The bar menu runs from a chicken, ham and leek pie to moules marinière with rosemary focaccia to duck leg on a hash brown with pineapple pickle and a fried duck egg. The à la carte adds Brancaster oysters with iced gin and tonic, aged sirloin with bone marrow sauce, and a vegetarian gnocchi with roast cauliflower and black garlic. Sunday roasts are Norfolk lamb or Gressingham duck. The reviews praise the atmosphere and warn about the wait, the portions and the prices, in roughly that order. Dogs are welcome. The Chestnut Group took it over at the end of 2024 and its bedrooms made The Sunday Times 100 Best Places to Stay 2025.

Trail Stops and Village Art

The pub matters more than usual because Ringstead sits on the Peddars Way, the old Roman road now walked as a National Trail, and the trail has almost nothing on it. Outside Little Cressingham, Castle Acre and here, there are no pubs and no shops for miles. So the village store is a landmark to a certain kind of tired walker, and the pub is one of very few places to stop.

There are two art galleries — Ringstead Gallery, and The Garage Studio about a hundred yards off the trail — in a village of 324 people. Sixteen buildings in the parish are listed.

One Church Survives

St Andrew's is the surviving church, a 13th-century tower onto a 14th-century nave and a 15th-century chancel, much rebuilt in 1865. It survives partly because another church didn't. St Peter's, out at Great Ringstead, was condemned in 1772 as "very old and much decayed...very damp and unwholesome," demolished the year after the two parishes were joined, and its stone, wood and glass sold off to repair St Andrew's. Its round tower still stands, now in a private garden and not open to anyone.

What Ringstead Lost

Ringstead has a talent for losing things. West of Downs Farm a roofless 13th-century chapel stands alone in a field, the last relic of Little Ringstead, a whole village emptied by plague in 1349 and never repopulated. The windmill built for Henry Le Strange carried six sails, stopped in 1897 and became a house in 1927, its machinery kept as decoration. The railway closed in 1969. The last bus went in 2018.

The Chalk Valley

Behind the village runs Ringstead Downs, a dry chalk valley cut by glacial meltwater and never once ploughed — the largest area of unimproved chalk grassland in Norfolk. Chalkhill blues and marbled whites fly there in summer, over wild thyme and horseshoe vetch. You can follow the bridleway the length of it, downhill, all the way to the edge of Hunstanton and the sea.