Discover a land of windmills, a flat and wet world of wildfowl, swans, and geese.  A place of solitude and escape. Dykes full of blowing reedmace cut across this exposed world, highways for creatures who subterfuge and cover is essential for survival.   In winter, wildfowl nibble grass on these expansive grazing marshes.  In summer, livestock munch the rich vegetation while swallows catch flies disturbed by trampling hooves.

The vast, open triangular space known as the Halvergate Marshes was an estuary in the Roman period.  The town of Great Yarmouth grew up on a sand spit which formed across the mouth of the Estuary. Only Breydon Water survives as a relict part of this once large estuary, the remainder transitioned, initially to salt marsh and later to drained marshland.

People have been living on the marshes for around 1000 years, initially for sheep grazing and salt working.  If you look carefully, you can still see a series of mounds or hills on the marshes, which are the spoils dumped by those early salt workers.  The word salary is derived from the word salt, which was the currency of the day.  Many marsh farms were established on the higher ground formed by the spoil from the salt workings.

By the eighteenth century, an increased number of drainage schemes created conditions suitable for cattle grazing. These cattle were sometimes brought great distances on the hoof from Scotland and Ireland.

The drainage schemes led to the introduction of a large number of drainage windmills, the greatest concentration outside the Netherlands. Many of these survive, often in a semi-derelict state.

The Halvergate Fleet, which runs across the middle of the marshes is a relict watercourse. The original road to Great Yarmouth, the Stone Road, ran alongside The Fleet prior to the construction of the Acle New Road, ‘the Acle Straight’ in the early 1830s.

As well as the Weavers’ Way and Wherryman’s Way long distance paths, two railway lines also cross the marshes but despite these various routes and proximity to Great Yarmouth, the marshes remain a vast remote expanse.