Sandringham

Woods, Estate Villages and the Nearest Pub

There are nearly 243 hectares of woodland and heath here that you can walk into for free, every day of the year, and park for free while you do it. This is the private country estate of the reigning monarch, and the arrangement is that you wander through the pine, oak, sweet chestnut and birch of Sandringham Warren while the family, when they are in residence, are somewhere behind the trees. Two waymarked nature trails run through it — one of a mile and a half, one of two and a half — and any number of other paths besides. The soil is sandy, the woodland part evergreen and part deciduous, and the whole thing sits inside the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, six or seven miles inland from the Wash.

You should know before you set your heart on a pub night that Sandringham itself has no pub. It is an estate hamlet, and the drinking is done in the surrounding villages — West Newton, Wolferton, Dersingham. Three of the four estate communities have social clubs which, along with the churches, do the work a village pub would normally do. The estate has at various points advertised a pub tenancy to let in West Newton, so the situation is not entirely settled, but at the time of writing you walk to the next village for a proper pint.

The nearest of those is the Feathers at Dersingham, about a mile off, a carrstone coaching inn on the edge of the estate. It keeps two changing beers and three regulars, holds the Cask Marque award, and has two large landscaped gardens, one of which contains a children's play area. Inside there are two bars, one wood-panelled, a dining room, a function room and six en-suite rooms. The food is sourced locally. It is child- and dog-friendly, has WiFi, and takes its name from the Prince of Wales feathers — the building was bought in 1882 for Albert Edward, the future Edward VII, and named in his honour. So even the pub belongs to the story.

Estate Kitchens, Royal Church and Lost Railway

For food during the day the estate runs its own kitchens at the Visitor Centre. The Sandringham Restaurant serves breakfast from half past nine, lunch from noon to three, and closes at half four, with much of the menu built around produce grown on the estate. Next to it the Terrace Takeaway Café does snacks to carry off, on the same daily hours, and on garden-open days the Stables Café opens seasonally from ten. None of this is a substitute for a village high street — there isn't one — but you will not go hungry between walks.

The building most worth going out of your way for is St Mary Magdalene, the estate church, which stands on raised ground in the woods. A church has stood on this spot since the fourteenth century; the present one is Tudor, sixteenth-century, restored by Samuel Sanders Teulon in 1855 and again by Sir Arthur Blomfield in 1890. Pevsner rated it perhaps the finest carrstone building in Britain — carrstone being the brownish local sandstone conglomerate that most of the estate is built from — and described it as "nobly lying on raised ground." The plain description undersells the inside. The chancel holds a solid silver altar and reredos made by the Parisian silversmiths Barkentin & Krall, presented to Queen Alexandra by the American department-store magnate Rodman Wanamaker as a memorial to Edward VII. Carved wooden angels frame it, some of them the work of Norwegian craftsmen, who cut much of the ornate woodwork throughout the church. There is a Florentine marble font, and a Greek font said to date to the ninth century, and a painted hammerbeam chancel roof from 1890, and stained glass in the east window designed by Charles Eamer Kempe. The royal family attend services here when in residence, most famously on Christmas Day. When George V died in January 1936, his coffin was carried from this church to Wolferton railway station.

That station is a good walk to the west, at the far edge of the estate, and its history is its own small saga. Wolferton was the nearest station to the house and the terminus for royal trains, opened in 1862 on the Lynn & Hunstanton Railway. The last royal train called in 1966 and the station closed in 1969. A railwayman named Eric Walker then bought it from British Rail and reopened the royal waiting room in 1970 as a museum of some 6,000 royal and historical items, drawing around 18,000 visitors a year. His son later sold the place after being refused permission for a larger advertising sign. The buildings deteriorated, were converted into a private residence in the late 1990s, and were bought and restored — signalbox and all — by Richard Brown from 2001. You cannot catch a train from there now. The nearest station is King's Lynn, about six miles south, on the mainline to Cambridge and London King's Cross, with bus connections onward from there.

Arriving, Ranging Wider and Entering the House

Getting here is otherwise straightforward. The A149, running from King's Lynn up to Hunstanton, goes past the estate, and there is free parking at the Visitor Centre. The Lynx service 34, King's Lynn to Hunstanton via Dersingham and Snettisham, stops at the Visitor Centre and at Cats Bottom Cottages on the A149.

If you want more walking than the two nature trails, there is a popular circular of about two and three-quarter miles — roughly an hour and ten — that loops through the parkland, the Warren woodland and the heath. On its western side it reaches Wolferton and the old royal station. Adjoining the estate is Dersingham Bog, a nature reserve of wet heath with heathland trails and its own flora and fauna, a genuinely different landscape from the dry pine woods a few hundred yards away. Wolferton, the westernmost estate village, sits near low cliffs and marsh where the land runs down to the Wash.

Back at the house itself there are sixty acres of formal gardens, woodland walks and lakes. The house is not the plain one Edward found in 1862 — that was a white-stuccoed Georgian block built by Cornish Henley — but a near-total rebuild carried out between 1870 and 1900 in a style Pevsner called "frenetic Jacobean." In the old stables and coach houses is Sandringham Museum, which runs from the first car owned by a British monarch, a 1900 Daimler, to a half-scale Aston Martin used by Princes William and Harry, along with a photographic record of the house going back to 1870. Each summer the grounds host the Sandringham Flower Show.

An Estate Shaped by Royal Lives

The estate has always operated almost as its own small country, with a dairy, a hospital, a stud farm, kennels and a school. Edward established the Sandringham Stud in 1897 and won with the racehorses Persimmon and Diamond Jubilee; Queen Alexandra kept more than a hundred dogs in the estate kennels. In 1893 the Prince of Wales gave York Cottage — originally the Bachelor's Cottage — as a wedding gift to Prince George, Duke of York, the future George V, who lived there with the future Queen Mary. Lady Frances Donaldson, weighing it up, wrote that "too large and too full of footmen to be unremarkable in Surbiton or Upper Norwood, York Cottage in its own context is a monument to the eccentricity of the family who lived there."

A great deal of dying has been done here too. George V died at Sandringham in January 1936; George VI died here in February 1952, aged fifty-six. And it was from a small office at Sandringham, on Christmas Day 1932, that George V gave the first royal Christmas broadcast by wireless, reading a text written for him by Rudyard Kipling. Elizabeth II gave her first Christmas message from her study here twenty years later, in 1952.

Loss, Memory and the Scale of Time

The estate's saddest story belongs to the men who worked it. In the First World War the 5th Battalion of the Norfolk Regiment included the Sandringhams — grooms, gardeners, farm labourers and household staff drawn straight off the King's estate. On 12 August 1915 they advanced at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli and were cut to pieces; the recorded dead for the rest of that August came to eleven officers and a hundred and fifty-one other ranks, and the men who saw them go forward into the smoke gave rise to the legend of the Vanished Battalion. In 1919 the bodies of 180 men were found scattered over about a square mile behind the old Turkish front line, near a spot where a Norfolk cap badge lay; 122 were identifiable as men of the 5th Norfolks. There is a window for them in the north aisle of St Peter and St Paul at West Newton — an Arts and Crafts window honouring Captain Frank Beck and E Company, with St George, the regimental insignia, and a view of Suvla Bay itself.

For all its scale — the estate now runs to about twenty thousand acres — Sandringham keeps turning back into small things. The Domesday surveyors, in 1086, recorded it among the smallest fifth of settlements in the survey: a single household, one slave, four acres of meadow, no plough teams, and a value of one pound, the same as it had been worth twenty years earlier. Nine hundred years and a monarchy later, you can still stand in the same woods with a takeaway coffee from the Stables Café and watch the family's more than usually well-connected church sit quietly on its little rise among the pines.