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Three Days in North Norfolk
Where the Sea Meets the Sky
We have just returned from a lovely few days in North Norfolk – “where the sea meets the sky”. We stayed at the Caley Hall Hotel, Hunstanton.
The hotel is nicely decorated with comfortable rooms. Plenty of reminders of why we do like to be beside the seaside including pale blue curtains patterned with a seagull print and table lamps made of large stacks of pebbles. The hotel has a nice little gin menu to whet your appetite at apéro time and the restaurant offers a varied menu, so there was more than enough to tempt us for our three night stay. If you got bored of it, the Neptune is next door which is Michelin starred – but we didn’t sample that.
Hunstanton Beach
It took us 3 and a half hours to drive down from Birmingham on Tuesday, so we didn’t have time to do more than take a walk down from the hotel to Hunstanton Beach. The beach is a beautiful expanse of sand and there were very few people there, so it was a very peaceful walk.
On Wednesday, we drove up the coast path to Cromer and visited the pier and the RNLI station. We walked along Hunstanton Beach again in the afternoon. On Thursday, we walked from Holkham Beach (very aptly described as “Where the Sea meets the Sky”) across to Wells-next-the-Sea. It took us a couple of hours to walk across the beach and up the harbour path into the town. We stopped for a coffee and walked back just in time to collect the car from the car park. You do need a bit of cash for car parking around here – we typically paid £3 – £5 to park the car everywhere we stopped which totalled around £20 in 3 days. Some of the machines take card, but cash seems to work more easily.
We drove back to Wells-next-the-Sea to sample a crab sandwich in a pretty little café. In the afternoon, we visited the gardens at Houghton Hall. The walled gardens are immaculately maintained and very impressive, but the admission fee was a bit steep at £12 per adult (£24 for the 2 of us).
North Norfolk is a great place to go walking as it is very flat, so you can cover quite a distance without getting too tired. The scenery is very peaceful and relaxing. At the time we visited, the sun shone, which really helped make it an enjoyable few days.
There is definitely mileage in another trip here. If we came back, I would like to see Brancaster Beach, visit Burnham Market and definitely take a boat trip to see the seal colony at Blakeney Point. Summer is probably a better time to visit when the seal pups begin to arrive. These tours need to be pre-planned though as they seemed to run only once a day from Morston Quay. When we were there, the boat departed at 1.30, but the timetable changes daily depending on tides.
