Salthouse

Crab on the green, fires by the marsh

Cookie's Crab Shop stands on the Green, selling crab, shellfish, samphire and smoked fish, and has been doing so for three generations. The fish shop opened here in 1956, run by Jack and Elsie Cooke — Jack, nicknamed Cookie, did the fishing, crabbing and bait-digging himself. It now belongs to their daughter Sue and her husband Peter, whom she met at Sheringham High School. You can buy a seafood platter and eat it looking at the marsh the crabs came out of.

Across the way, on the west side of the green, is the Dun Cow: an old inn with flint walls, exposed beams and log fires, and a big garden that looks straight over the salt marshes. The menu changes daily on whatever's local — fish and chips with a crisp golden batter, beef ragu, burgers, lobster and steak, piri piri spatchcock chicken, prawn chowder. Woodforde's Wherry is on the bar, alongside Adnams and Doom Bar. The owner, Mat, gets named in reviews as helpful and friendly. Dogs are welcome in the bar. It's a short walk from the beach and the natural place to end a marsh walk.

Marsh, shingle and heath

The marsh is the whole point of Salthouse. The village runs along the A149 between a high inland ridge and open salt marsh, all flint walls and wide sky. NWT Cley and Salthouse Marshes — 66 hectares of grazing marsh and saline lagoons — front a shingle beach, and the birdwatching hides opposite the Dun Cow are well used.

Walks go in every direction from here. The Norfolk Coast Path runs along the shingle past the village, west across the marshes to Cley-next-the-Sea and east toward Gramborough Hill. There's a two-mile circular to Cley along the beach and back inland past the reserve, and a longer 5.5-mile loop up onto the gorse-and-heather heath around Bard Hill, where a WWII radar station once stood, then back over the fields to finish at the pub. A ten-mile sculpture trail winds across Kelling and Salthouse heaths, inaugurated in 2008.

Ship graffiti above the salt marsh

St Nicholas sits on a hill above the marshes with the sea behind it. It was largely rebuilt around 1500 under Sir Henry Heydon of Baconsthorpe, finished in 1503, and it holds a 15th-century font carried on carved lions and a medieval painted rood screen. On the backs of the pews and choir stalls are ships — galleons and sailing vessels scratched into the wood by seafaring parishioners, or by bored choristers during long sermons. The outlines are still easy to make out.

Salt, ports and Domesday

Salthouse got its name from boiling seawater in clay pots to make salt. It was one of the Glaven Ports until the channel silted up in the mid-1500s. The Domesday surveyors recorded a mill, two acres of meadow and forty goats, and valued the place at four pounds — the same four pounds it had been worth twenty years earlier.

Rail, bus and a naval son

Sheringham station is about five miles east, on the Bittern Line to Norwich, and the coastal bus runs through the village. Vice-Admiral Sir Christopher Myngs, privateer and naval hero, was baptised at St Nicholas in 1625, the son of the village shoemaker.