The Rose & Crown sits on Old Church Road and was built in the 14th century to house and feed the men putting up the church next door. It has been a free house since 1976 and still works as a village drinking pub as much as a place to eat. In cooler months the Brancaster mussels are the thing people order; the menu also runs to Brancaster crab thermidor with samphire, and a chicken schnitzel with a fried egg, truffle and parmesan fries. The mussels, oysters and samphire come from Brancaster, the asparagus and strawberries from farmers nearby.
The garden was once the village bowling green. It is walled and sunny, with a play area for children and a Beach Hut Bar that opens at weekends and whenever the weather cooperates. Dogs are welcome in the bars, the garden and a section of the restaurant. The pub was Good Pub Guide Pub of the Year in 2015 and turns up in the Telegraph's top 500, and it has been run by Jeannette and Anthony Goodrich since 1995.
The other survivor is the Queen Victoria on Lynn Road, a coastal local that started as a beerhouse, saw off a closure threat in 1909, and took on the licence of the Plough when that pub shut in 1932. Several others — the New Inn, the Compass, the Grapes — did not make it. The Burrell family kept the Victoria going for decades either side of 1900.
The village itself is small and independent about it. There is an arts-and-crafts shop, a picture framer, an art gallery and an old-fashioned bookshop, alongside the ordinary shops you'd want. For anything bigger, Drove Orchards at Thornham is about six miles off.
St Mary's is the church the Rose & Crown was built for. Pevsner called it "perhaps the most exciting 14th-century Decorated church in Norfolk." Its stone spire runs to about 172 feet and served for centuries as a navigation mark for ships on The Wash. When the first Bishop of Fredericton wanted a model for his cathedral in New Brunswick, this is the church he chose.
Snettisham is built partly of carrstone, the reddish-brown local stone dug at a quarry that is now an SSSI, and it overlooks The Wash, with the Lincolnshire shore about fifteen miles across the water. The beach and the RSPB reserve are a couple of miles west of the village proper. On the biggest spring tides the rising water pushes tens of thousands of knot and dunlin off the mudflats into a single swirling mass over the lagoons — the Snettisham Spectacular. In winter it's pink-footed geese instead, up to forty thousand of them flighting in at dawn.
The A149 runs through on its way between King's Lynn and Hunstanton, and the Lynx 34 and 35 and Coastline 36 buses stop here roughly four times an hour. The nearest trains are at King's Lynn, nine miles south.
There are also, as of 2024, about a hundred feral chickens living around Common Road. Some residents wear earplugs. A petition was raised to stop the parish council evicting them.
