Sedgeford

The King Willie

The King William IV has dog beds, dog-specific dining tables, and something on the menu called a gourmet doggy meal. Locals call it the King Willie. It was purpose-built as an inn in the early 1830s by a publican named William Brockbank, in the reign of the king it's named after, and it still has the timber beams, flagstone floors and flint walls to prove it. A 2024 renovation added nine rooms and split the restaurant into four areas and two bars, which is a lot of pub for a village of six hundred people.

The food is comforting pub classics and seasonal dishes, freshly cut sandwiches at lunch, and a Sunday roast with crunchy potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and what the kitchen calls the chef's rich, glossy gravy. Under-twelves eat free on Sundays with each full-paying adult. One TripAdvisor reviewer stayed a while and reported: "We had a different meal every night with no complaints." The beer is Woodforde's Wherry plus two changing guests, and there's a large garden out the back with a covered area for when Norfolk does what Norfolk does.

Shops and St Mary's

For shops you go to Heacham, about two miles west. There isn't a butcher or a farm shop in Sedgeford itself, which keeps things quiet.

The church sits on high ground above the village, and it's the reason people who like churches make the trip. St Mary the Virgin is one of Norfolk's 124 round-tower churches and the largest of them by area. The round tower is 56 and a half feet, built of flint in one 13th-century go, with an octagonal belfry whose corners overhang the circle below — an odd bit of engineering you can stand underneath and squint at. Inside there's a 12th-century Purbeck marble font on three steps, faint wall paintings including a St Christopher, and a musical angel in old glass. Pevsner is reported to have called it "the most exciting C14th Decorated church in Norfolk." The east half of the chancel came down in the 1770s after the end collapsed, and was simply removed rather than rebuilt.

Two thousand years of archaeology

Sedgeford has been lived in for a long time. There's a significant Iron Age settlement, Roman and Anglo-Saxon occupation, and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery south of the village that has given up around three hundred skeletons. Since 1996 the digging has been done by SHARP, the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project, one of the largest independent archaeological projects in Britain, which runs summer excavation seasons open to the public. In 2003 they found a hoard of Iron Age gold staters hidden inside a hollowed cow bone, revealed by X-ray, and unearthed an Iron Age horse burial the same day.

Walking the farming valley

The Peddars Way National Trail passes through the parish, a Romanised stretch of the prehistoric Icknield Way, running past Magazine Wood along a former railway line. The village publishes its own Sedgeford Walks, from one mile to eight and a half, through barley, wheat and sugar-beet fields on the north side of the Heacham River valley. The sea is about five miles off; Hunstanton and its striped cliffs are four.

A village football team

There's also a football team, Sedgeford FC, which on a farming valley of this size feels about right.