Take the road less travelled: cycling Norfolk’s country lanes | Travel

It is late April and I cycle into early summer season. Hills taut with environmentally friendly shoots, dashing hares and dithering pheasants convey me to Sandringham below large skies.

My thighs have experienced a moderate training — now they can have a crack at the royal estate. Sandringham’s store, cafe and ticket workplace are all Farrow & Ball with a faint scent of National Have faith in. The Victorian stately home by itself provides a glimpse of the Queen’s private life: her navy placemats aspect snaps of her favorite horses, and family members pictures in frames. She has unquestionably inherited stuff she’s not quite positive what to do with. Her great-grandmother Queen Alexandra was a hoarder when I see hundreds of smaller jade sculptures I pity whoever does the royal dusting.

Restricted-lipped stewards have obviously been briefed to rebuff any questions of a far more private nature. Selection of bedrooms? “I anticipate Google will inform you . . .” Is the Queen browsing the home nowadays as it is her birthday? “I’m not at liberty to say . . .”

At St Mary Magdalene Church, manufactured of Carrstone brick that appears like stacks of ginger brownies, intel about exactly where the royals sit for solutions is much more conveniently proffered. Twelve senior royals come by means of the vestry and sit in the chancel for Xmas. But on frequent Sundays, Prince Philip would sit with the congregation in the nave. Who cares? My mum, steadfast royalist, subscriber to Majesty Magazine and significant commentator of The Crown, relishes this variety of monarchical trivialities.

Following a prevent at Sandringham’s restaurant for a Norfolk beef burger dipped in Sandringham ale chutney (it is not just Charles with his have generate selection, you know), I carry on to Castle Increasing, the internet site of a really good castle — early medieval and skyscraping — propped on 18m-significant earthworks, and on to Anmer. There’s no sign of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge — Anmer Corridor was their present from the Queen — but squabbling geese and their lovable goslings on the village pond entertain me.

I toast my journey with a citrussy, amber Norfolk Wherry less than the evening sun back at the Rose & Crown. Pint-ingesting locals assure me that the route to my next stop, Burnham Industry — “Chelsea-on-Sea” for its million-pound residences and SUVs parked all more than — will be a doddle compared with the pre-Sandringham hillocks.

The up coming early morning a headwind slows my pace. Wild cherry trees shower me in a confetti of white petals and bees and butterflies bop my experience. Hedgerows of hawthorn, curling ivy and horse parsley chortle with birdsong. The fields — canvases of golden rapeseed below a flawless blue sky — appear like heartfelt East Anglian guidance for Ukraine.

Burnham Market place is posh and very really with its line of sash-windowed Georgian households. I get lunch from the Humble Pie Deli, a spinach and cheese parcel and a wedge of Norfolk Mardler — as I chunk into the waxed goat’s cheese, the “mardle”, Norfolk gossip floats my way. There is outrage that the ice cream for dogs prices far more than a cone for humans and it appears “upmarket home-sitting” is a issue.

I pedal on in advance of I prevent for a beer: Nelson’s Bitter at the admiral’s excellent old boozer in Burnham Thorpe. Just a 50 percent-pint though — a prolonged climb unfurls at the village’s finish. But when I get to South Lodge, gateway to Holkham Hall, it is not the biking that tends to make me gasp.

The Earls of Leicester realized how to pimp a driveway. A mile-extensive, arrow-straight avenue slopes up to an obelisk. Guests in carriages would occur round the obelisk, crest the hill, and be dazzled, catching sight of the symmetrical, honey-stoned neo-Palladian pile. Russian oligarchs consume your hearts out.

Holkham Hall is impressive outdoors and in: there is a distant-managed fountain and an 18th-century tapestried lavatory. Barley grown on the estate goes into Adnams beer in subsequent-doorway Suffolk, and into the honeycomb in Maltesers. I have meal at the deservedly well known flint and brick Victoria Inn, the place culled estate fallow deer is served as the tenderest venison loin.

I sense completely refuelled and the future early morning a couple hills are not unwelcome. I pass flat-ish Wells exactly where shops providing neon buckets and spades outshine the chic gift retailers, and pedal up and down in the direction of Walsingham, scene of the 11th-century apparition of the Virgin Mary. It’s superior for me.

I make it to Walsingham Farms Shop for lunch. Deli staff advise I attempt a purple Leicester-design really hard cheese launched by Norfolk’s Ferndale Farm — so new, they’re jogging a competitiveness to discover a title. The deli gentleman thinks he’s acquired 1: “ ‘Cheesus’ would market really perfectly round listed here!”

The tranquil backyard garden ruins of Walsingham’s medieval Priory are hid driving timber-framed properties bearing saints’ names. The crucial to the esoteric Museum of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with its 1000’s of Marian statues, coins and Pilgrimage badges, is mislaid so I settle for an unholy amaretto and pistachio ice cream at Epiphany around the highway (cones sold alongside handmade rosaries).

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The next working day I’m off once more: slopes, dips and tapering lanes carry me to Cley up coming the Sea. Given that the River Glaven silted up, Cley is no longer seaside. But there, a mile from the form-shifting shingle shore, behind saltmarsh and reedbeds and under a warm cloudless sky, rises Cley Windmill. It was developed in the early 1800s and this night it’s the place I’m remaining. I feel as if I have wandered into a portray from the Dutch Golden Age.

A brief journey away at Cley Marshes, reeds curved by the wind like leaning Lowry figures conceal a babble of birds. I lock up the bicycle and wander to the hides, which neglect sunlight-brilliant scrapes (freshwater pools) in the marsh. I’m airside at Norfolk’s avian Heathrow. Geese appear into land like wilting paper planes, as crimson-beaked shelducks with metre-extensive black-hemmed wings carry off.

Back again at the customer centre’s futuristic café, its extensive windows total of coastal character, I grab a coffee prior to urgent on to quayside Blakeney and a pint with the terns and gulls. Do-it-yourself cheese, ice product and lashings of area beer — perhaps the elegance of a biking vacation is in the refuelling.

Claire Boobbyer was a visitor of Inntravel, which has six nights’ B&B on a self-guided trip from £1,045pp, including bike hire, route notes and some further foods (inntravel.co.united kingdom). She was also a guest of Increased Anglia trains (greateranglia.co.british isles)

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