Warham

The Pub Behind the Hatch

The Three Horseshoes on The Street has a serving hatch, once common and now a very rare feature. Twenty wines by the glass pass through it. The bar rooms are gaslit, with panelling, painted roughcast walls and china plates hung about, and window grilles that still bear the name of Steward & Patteson, Norwich brewers who no longer exist. The Good Pub Guide, which named it "the cream of the crop" of Britain's unspoilt pubs, called it "the old-fashioned flint and brick pub" with "plenty of charm."

The pub was established in 1725 and marked its 300th anniversary in 2025, the year it reopened after a refurbishment as an inn with rooms. Until the 1960s it occupied only the current bar and a snug, which was so small the village nicknamed it "The Sentry Box." A blocked low arch marks where carts once came through.

Pies and Parish Churches

For about thirty years it ran under Iain Salmon, known for his pies: game, chicken and rabbit, cranberry lamb, steak and stout, fish pie, each with a flaky top served in its own dish. The pies survived the changeover. The current team, who also run Sculthorpe Mill and The Ship at Brancaster, keep them on alongside Sunday lunch. There are ten bedrooms now, and garden cabins going into the garden.

Warham has two large medieval churches, which is one more than most villages this size and, at one point, one fewer than Warham had. A third, St Mary the Virgin, stood just east of All Saints until the Reformation.

Two Medieval Churches

All Saints, in the village centre near the pub, is the one still in use — since 1960 it has held the parish's services alone. Its west tower has gone and its side aisles were removed; you can see the filled-in arches. Inside is a plain 1801 Georgian interior with white walls, box pews and a three-decker pulpit, and windows full of Flemish glass, including two angels playing lutes. Two white wooden doors off the chancel lead to the Turner family mausoleum, bare and cold, with ledger stones underfoot and hatchments on the walls.

St Mary Magdalene sits about 500 metres west on Chapel Street. It has a font Betjeman was fond of and no electricity, so it is used only in July and August.

From the Stiffkey Valley to the Camp

The village runs along the gentle valley of the River Stiffkey, three miles inland from the coast and about the same from Wells-next-the-Sea, where the nearest shops are. The B1105 to Fakenham passes close by, and the Coasthopper bus runs the coast road through Wells.

South of the village, on chalk grassland, is Warham Camp, the best-preserved Iron Age hillfort in Norfolk. It is a near-perfect circle, about 212 metres across, built by the Iceni and later home to a Roman blacksmith — a 2023 community dig found coins, hobnails and hammerscale, and turned up on Digging for Britain. Rock-rose and squinancywort grow on the banks. Locally it is called the Danish Camp, which it is not.

Nelson and the Request Stop

Mary Turner, buried in that cold mausoleum, was sister to Robert Walpole and great-grandmother to Horatio Nelson. Warham has one request halt on the Wells and Walsingham Light Railway, the longest ten-and-a-quarter-inch gauge steam line in the world. It is a platform shelter in a field, and you have to flag the train down.