Peddars Way: Rhubarb Cottage to Fring Cross

This section of the Peddars Way courses arrow-straight across the Norfolk countryside and, as such, provides the world with a collector’s item: a set of walking instructions that at no point asks the hiker to turn left or right. It also studiously avoids every hamlet and village in the area. The route is a wide, sometimes stony, sometimes grassy, cart-track affording easy walking and always gently rising or falling through one of the loneliest parts of Norfolk. Much of the land is arable and, except in small parts, there is little sign of the forest which would once have held sway. Yet all along the way there are fine views on both sides of distant villages, farms and churches, and there is a pleasing sense of solitude and calm.

From the junction of the B1145. the track crosses, in fairly quick succession, three small roads south-west from the pretty villages of Great and Little Massingham. The former once boasted an Augustinian
priory, fragments of which remain, and was the home of the late-Elizabethan physician Stephen Perse, who founded the Perse School at Cambridge. It is an attractive village, with a large pond and two greens at its heart. There was once both a market and a fair here.

The route leads downhill to cross the busy A148 at Harpley Dams. The former house of the crossing-keeper of the old railway line is now the ‘Dogotel Kennels and Cattery’.

The Way then climbs up towards Harpley Common. To the east, beyond the woods, is Houghton Hall, a great Palladian house (the biggest in Norfolk) built for Sir Robert Walpole, chief minister to the first two King Georges. Built of Yorkshire stone, it was designed by Colin Campbell with a fine interior by Kent, and was completed in 1735.

The Peddars Way then crosses a small road to Anmer, a village on the 20,000-acre Sandringham Estate, beyond which is Sandringham itself; the Norfolk home of the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh. The lovely gardens and grounds are open to the public. The area of scrub to the left of the route after the crossroads is known as Anmer Minque, and after the next crossroads, with the B1153, the profile of Great Bircham Windmill can be seen to the north.

The path continues its straight course, passing between the villages of Great Bircham to the east and Shernborne, whose fine church was splendidly rebuilt by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) at the turn of the century, to the west.

Near Fring it crosses two roads before descending past two woods to the footbridge and road to Sedgeford, where a beautiful torc from the Iron Age was unearthed, at Fring Cross.