‘Remember, Norfolk is not flat - it
undulates’

Norfolk (writes Antony Grey) is not on the way to anywhere. This county of rolling cornfields and luxuriant pasture thrusts out into the North Sea to give England’s eastern seaboard its voluptuous shape. It’s out on a limb geographically, and I believe it is this that has shaped Norfolk's character.

It was to Norfolk that the invading Angles, who gave England its name, first came in the fifth century. With the other Teutonic tribes, the Saxons and the Jutes, they sailed out across the North Sea from the River Elbe and made landfall on the hump of Norfolk’s coastline. They dubbed this the land of the ‘North Folk’ and with the adjoining county of Suffolk – the land of the ‘South Folk’ – this became East Anglia long before the rest of the country became known as Angle-land.

Other invaders, Celts, Romans, Danes and the peaceful Flemings passed through the county too, en route for the hinterland, leaving their own individual inheritances, most noticeably today in Norflk’s place names. But it was the Normans who came to crown the county for all time, with a supremely beautiful cathedral and a stout, mounded fortress. The slender soaring spire of the cathedral has been called most beautiful building in the world.

I was born in Norfolk, grew up there and during 20 years or so, living and travelling outside its boundaries, I have been ever ready to sing its praises. In the popular mind, Norfolk’s name is synonymous with flatness, and the implication is always there that a certain dullness must therefore go with it. For example, the only reference to the county in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations is a brittle witticism from one of Noel Coward's characters, that makes precisely this point. ‘Very flat, Norfolk,’ says the quotation, baldly.

I’m afraid if my old history master, a Norfolkophile by the name of Mr Cave, had ever got near Noel Coward he would have ruffled his hair for a remark like that. That at least was how he disabused me repeatedly at an early age of the mistaken idea that the county's landscape might be compared to a pancake. ‘Remember, Norfolk is not flat, Grey,’ he would bellow at me, ‘it undulates!’ To stress the word he would make a sweeping wavy motion in the air with hand and arm that invariably ended, much to the amusement of the class, by rumpling my hair.

But Mr Cave was right of course. Although there’s no point in pretending that Norfolk embraces romantic mountain ranges, it does indeed undulate. Those rolling barley-fields and green grazing-meadows rise and fall in a gentle tonal patchwork across the county until, along the North Norfolk Coast, the land rises finally to commanding heights 300 feet above the sea. Here pine trees stand tall above the gorse and bracken-covered hummocks of heathland. Between them little valleys make the roads dip and swing along the coast.

These hillocks, known as the ‘East Anglian heights’, are in fact the northern head of the same chalk downs which sweep in a bow-like arc across the whole of southern England, through the Chilterns and Sussex to their western limits in Dorset. They are my favourite part of Norfolk. Although I was born in the county’s heart at Norwich, I lived alone for a year in part of an old country house in the pines above the beach at Weybourne. I was a reporter then, covering the area for the county’s daily paper, the Eastern Daily Press. In the early morning I trained track-suited for Saturday rugby, crunching over the very same stony beaches and sandhills that local historical accounts say those ancient Angles must have trodden.

I ranged back and forth along this rugged, spectacular seaboard by day and night, covering alarmingly frequent sea rescue stories involving the lifeboats launched from Sheringham, Cromer and Wells-next-the-Sea. As a result I developed a great respect for the unpredictable seas that wash the county’s 100-mile coastline – and an even greater respect for the taciturn fishermen who man those lifeboats.

In the work of these fishermen, some of the unchanging qualities of life in Norfolk are still discernible. Slip down through the narrow, winding streets of flint cottages to see for yourself. In Cromer you’ll find them landing the famous orange-shelled Cromer crabs, at Sheringham you can watch them sitting in their beached boats tying the pincers of lobsters with twine before packing them live for shipment to London. On the quayside at Wells, you might see 60 baskets of large, spiral-shelled whelks landed from one boat and dunked in great string bags into a brick-built cauldron of boiling water.

Just beyond Weybourne, going west, the land falls away and really does become pancake flat. A brown-grey plain spreads towards the sea with the harbours of Cley, Blakeney and Wells-next-the-Sea nestling the edge of the chalk shelf, well back from modern shore line.

A white-sailed windmill at Cley is possibly the county’s most photographed and most painted landmark and Blakeney’s medieval harbour has become a fashionable yachting centre. Because of the silting action of the tides Blakeney’s quays now lie four miles from the open sea, and the spit land known as Blakeney Point, protecting estuary, has become a nature reserve which is a paradise for sea and marsh birds and ornithologists alike.

Around these villages cattle graze on green flats between the road and the sea, ducks squawk and paddle on the dykes and the white sails of dinghies glide incongruously through the marshy distance on invisible cuts. Sea pinks and sea lavender splash the marshes with colour in summer and autumn and here too you find, for a short season of six weeks in the year, a local delicacy which will enable you to savour the true tang and flavour of North Norfolk. It is called samphire.

This rich, green, many-fronded herb gets its strange modern name from a Norfolk corruption of its original name, ‘St. Pierre’'s wort’. It is best eaten after being boiled and sprinkled with salt, pepper, vinegar and possibly butter. Once called ‘poor man’s asparagus’ by locals, it is now beginning to find its way on to the menus of expensive restaurants as a gourmet’s hors d’oeuvre. It grows wild on the marshes and appears only from the beginning of July to the middle of August. Its taste is subtly savoury, but otherwise indefinable. You will buy this delicacy as likely as not from blue-smocked fishermen at the roadside. They will have gathered it themselves and wrapped it in newspaper packages for sale.

Farther west at Burnham Thorpe, a few miles from the coast, is the birthplace of Norfolk’s most famous son, Lord Nelson. His father was the village rector, and although Nelson himself was buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral after his death at Trafalgar, the church is resplendent with many mementoes of him and his family, including naval flags and a lectern fashioned from the timbers of the Victory. The village too remains in many ways as Horatio Nelson must have known it, with its cottages and farms clustered timelessly among the quiet meadows.

A well-recommended holiday cottage in Burnham Thorpe is The Corner Pightle: www.sunnyhunny.com (Tel 01223 246382).