The best weekends here start with doing almost nothing. Arrive on Friday as the light goes, leave the car where it is until Sunday, and let the coast set the pace. This is the loose shape we suggest to guests who ask us how to spend two days, give or take a long bath.
Friday: arrive, and stay put
Aim to reach the house before dark. There will be a fire in the drawing room, something cold in the pantry and a short supper on the table from seven. Resist the urge to plan. Walk to the bench at the end of the meadow instead and watch the sea turn from pewter to ink.
Saturday: the cliff path, crab and a country house
Breakfast arrives whenever you wake. Afterwards, go out of the garden gate and follow the Norfolk Coast Path west along the cliffs. In forty minutes or so the tower of Cromer's parish church, the tallest in Norfolk, will rise over the rooftops ahead.
Wander the lanes, walk the length of the pier and then do the essential thing: buy a dressed Cromer crab and eat it on a bench with brown bread and a view. In the afternoon, borrow the car keys after all and drive ten minutes inland to Felbrigg, a seventeenth-century hall with a great wood that is made for walking off lunch.
Leave the car where it is until Sunday, and let the coast set the pace.
Back at the house, the bath in The Lookout faces straight out to sea. Supper on Saturday is the one to book: a short menu built around whatever the boats and the walled garden have given us that day.
Sunday: sand, pines and a late checkout
Set off early for Holkham, fifty minutes west along the coast road. The path through the pines opens onto a beach so wide that at low tide the sea is barely there. Walk until you are hungry, then carry on to Wells-next-the-Sea for the beach huts and a quayside lunch.
On the way home, stop in Holt, a Georgian town rebuilt in brick after a great fire in 1708 and now full of bookshops and delis. Checkout on Sundays is at two, so there is time for one more cup of tea on the terrace before the drive.
