Norfolk Coast Path

Ten quick kilometres that are more town than coast. The start is sand and shingle under low sandy cliffs at Hopton, with rock groynes and boulder defences on the beach, and it firms up onto promenade at Gorleston. Then the trail turns its back on the sea. It leaves the seafront, follows the west bank of the Yare inland past the port, crosses the river on the town bridge and threads through the middle of Great Yarmouth before coming back out to the seafront, which is roughly three miles of pavement and road in the middle of a coastal walk. Nothing underfoot will slow you down and nothing much will lift you either. The compensation is that this is the easiest place on the whole route to buy anything or get on a train.

Navigation: Well signed but easy to lose. Through the town the waymarking is National Trail acorn stickers on lampposts rather than posts, and walkers report checking more than once in the residential streets and around the holiday parks that they are still on the line. The simple rule is to keep the river on your right until the bridge.

The long, low, sandy eastern arm, and the part of this trail that most needs a tide table. North of Great Yarmouth the walking is seafront, then a disused railway line running along the top of the sea wall, then beach and dune. Between Hemsby and Winterton the sandy cliffs are actively going into the sea, the clifftop route has been lost with them, and the beach is the trail for about 3.7 km with no way up. From Winterton the character changes completely: the path drops in behind a high dune ridge and runs for a dozen kilometres through marram, blackthorn scrub and small damp woods, out of sight of the sea, past the grey seal colony at Horsey. Sea Palling puts you back on open sand and sea defences, and from Happisburgh to Walcott it is beach below eroding cliffs, finishing on concrete sea wall. Flat the whole way, and slower than flat sounds wherever the sand is dry.

Logistics: The beach past the Hemsby erosion site is the route, not a beach shortcut. The clifftop alternative used at high tide has gone and about 3.7 km has to be cleared in one push, so this stretch sets the start time for the day rather than merely deserving care.

Navigation: The least reliably waymarked part of the trail. Markers thin out around Bacton and through the caravan parks and lanes behind Happisburgh, and walkers describe falling back on keeping the sea to their right and picking up the next post. Do not expect a signed way round the erosion site at Hemsby: the high-tide clifftop route there was closed permanently and no replacement had been agreed when this was checked, so read the trail's own notices before the day rather than looking for an arrow on the ground.

A short link where the coast finally acquires some height. The sea wall ends, the path climbs onto the clifftop and runs on grass and field edge fifteen to twenty metres up, past the fenced perimeter of Bacton gas terminal and above a beach that has been deliberately rebuilt with dredged sand to keep the sea off it. Mundesley at the far end is a working small resort with a promenade and a beach you can get down to. Six kilometres, nothing steep, and the first section where you are looking down at the sea rather than walking on it.

Logistics: Two places to eat sit within 5 km of each other here and they behave very differently, which matters more than the count. Cafe Carmel at Bacton, on Walcott Road at km 45, is listed everywhere as 10.30am to 4pm Wednesday to Sunday and shut Monday and Tuesday; it has no website of its own, so that is directory listing rather than the cafe's own word, and it is worth a look at its Facebook page before you count on it. The Ship Inn at 21 Beach Road, Mundesley, at km 49.5, is the opposite: its own site gives food noon to 2.45pm and 5pm to 8pm Monday to Friday, noon to 8.30pm on Saturday and noon to 7.30pm on Sunday, so it feeds you seven days a week and it also lets rooms. The eastern arm is not the foodless third it sometimes gets written up as. What changes a plan is which day of the week you arrive at Bacton, not whether anything is there.

Navigation: Straightforward once you are up, with the sea on your right the whole way. The awkward moment is finding the way up off the sea wall at the Bacton end, where waymarking is reported as thin and inconsistent.

The most varied stretch on the trail, and the one where the statistics mislead in both directions. From Trimingham the path runs on rolling clifftop grass, field edges and short pieces of woodland, drops to the beach for the hard sand between Overstrand and Cromer, then climbs back over the cliffs to Sheringham by way of Beeston Hill, which is the sharpest thing on the route. All of that is genuinely undulating by Norfolk standards. West of Weybourne it goes flat and gets much harder: the trail turns onto the shingle bank and stays on it for the best part of seven kilometres to Cley, loose pebbles the whole way, with occasional concrete slabs laid along it that are worth hunting for. The National Trail's own advice is to allow extra time for it, and half as long again is a fair guess. Cromer and Sheringham in the middle are full-sized towns and the busiest walking of the trip.

Logistics: The Cley to Weybourne shingle is the slowest ground on the trail and no ascent figure can see it. A day planned across it on distance alone will run long.

Navigation: Well signed for most of it, with two places to watch. At Sheringham the route leaves the promenade and turns up Cliff Road, and the marker for that turn has been reported as a small sticker on the back of a road sign rather than a post. On the shingle the bank is wide enough that a walker following the water's edge can walk straight past the signed turn off it, so bear towards the landward side of the ridge as you come up on Cley.

The Norfolk people come for, and the fastest easy walking on the route. From Cley the trail runs on flood banks and marsh-edge paths above one of the most important saltmarshes in Europe, mostly on short rabbit-cropped turf, with creeks filling and draining beside you and birds in every direction. The banks are raised and boardwalked where they need to be, so the official line stays usable at all states of the tide even where the marsh either side does not. Blakeney across the Freshes to Cley is as easy as walking gets. West of Wells the ground turns to sand: a pine belt, then the dunes at Holkham and Burnham Overy, where the soft stuff behind the ridge is the slowest going of the section. The sting comes at the end, a pull inland and uphill off the coast at Brancaster onto open arable at a little over fifty metres, the highest ground on the trail, with no shade and nothing to drink on it.

Logistics: The climb inland behind Brancaster is the only real ascent west of Sheringham and there is nothing on it. Fill your bottles at Brancaster Staithe rather than at the top.

Navigation: Easy. On the marsh half the raised bank gives one obvious line and the church towers and Cley windmill do the rest. The mistake here is not a wrong turn but a temptation, leaving the marked bank to cut seaward across the marsh. The creeks between Blakeney, Morston and Stiffkey fill from behind you rather than in front, and that is where people get cut off.

Two different walks joined at Hunstanton. The first comes down off the arable ridge to Thornham and then runs on the best surface anywhere on the trail, a long mature boardwalk over dune and marsh through Holme, then golf links, dune tops and the grassy strip along the clifftop above Hunstanton's striped cliffs. At Hunstanton the coast turns south and the trail turns with it, and the walk becomes something else entirely: promenade and beach huts to Heacham, shingle and chalets beyond it, and then from Snettisham Scalp roughly sixteen kilometres of grass sea bank along the Wash, reclaimed farmland on one side, saltmarsh and mudflats on the other, grazing cattle on the bank itself. It is level, quiet, genuinely remote and completely without villages, shelter or anywhere to buy anything, and it ends on road past the docks into King's Lynn. Plenty of people finish at Hunstanton for exactly that reason. The rest find it the emptiest and the best of the walking for birds.

Logistics: Nothing is sold between Snettisham and King's Lynn. RSPB Snettisham reads as a major reserve on a map and has a waterless toilet in the car park and no shop or cafe, so treat the Wash bank as a carry-everything stretch.

Navigation: The line is obvious, one bank with the Wash on one side, and it is signposted from the reserve onwards. The trap is printed rather than physical: the Hunstanton to King's Lynn stretch only became coast path in 2024, and older guidebooks and walking blogs describe getting round this coast on lanes, blocked bridges and improvised detours. Ignore all of that. On the bank there are gates between grazing compartments and almost no junctions to get wrong.

A quiet coda that most walkers never do. It leaves King's Lynn, crosses the Great Ouse to West Lynn, and then follows the old sea bank west along the southern shore of the Wash as the Peter Scott Walk. The bank is grass, level and dead straight for long stretches, saltmarsh and a distant sea on one side, reclaimed farmland and straight drainage channels on the other. There is nothing on it: no village, no shelter, no water, and on most days very few people. Whether that reads as bleak or as the best thing on the walk depends on the walker and the weather. Our line stops on the bank near Clenchwarton rather than carrying on to the lighthouse at Sutton Bridge.

Logistics: Continuing west of King's Lynn depends on crossing the Great Ouse, and the crossing is a foot ferry rather than a bridge.

Navigation: There is one line and it is the top of the bank, so route finding is not the problem. Getting onto it is: the Great Ouse has no bridge here and the crossing is by the West Lynn foot ferry.