What’s Norfolk to you? Wild silver salt marshes and desolate crying birds riding winter winds. Or neon lights, fairground thrills and roller coaster razzamatazz! You can love both, and they’re just a few miles apart.

Berney Arms station is one of the most isolated in Britain. A single lonely platform sits incongruously on the open landscape of Halvergate Marshes. Built in the 1840s, the station is only accessible by foot or rail, a request stop on the Norwich to Great Yarmouth line.

Thomas Trench Berney sold land to the railway company on condition they built a station near his Reedham Cement Company. Today only the majestic Berney Arms Windmill still stands, a relic of this once busy industrial operation on the River Yare. The workers are gone. But sheep and cattle still graze on Halvergate Marshes, as they have for more than two centuries. Now managed for wildlife as well as livestock, Berney Marshes is home to an RSPB nature reserve, near the mill.

Once the marshes were a vast tidal estuary opening into the North Sea. Longshore drift created the spit of land where the glitzy queen of Norfolk now shines. A medieval herring port, Great Yarmouth is a rough diamond, full of heart and history, home to brilliant museums, the cool Yare Gallery and the Hippodrome Circus with its spectacular water show (‘one of the seven wonders of the British seaside’ said the Telegraph).

The Wherryman’s Way also links Berney and Yarmouth, another way to explore the joyous contrasts of Norfolk.