Words & Photographs by Emma Latham Phillips.
The morning sun is just beginning to slip in through the curtains. Soon the kettle will let off a hiss like a steam train, and I’ll have to leave the warmth of the blankets to make tea. At Settle, it’s very hard to move from the bed. Co-owner, Joanna Morfoot has designed the interior in a way that makes you want to stay, curled up reading, for days on end. Settle is based on parkland that once formed part of the neighbouring Norfolk estate and dotted at a distance, between the three lakes and light-dappled trees, are two railway carriages and a cabin.
We’re staying in Carriage No. 1, a railway carriage that’s been painstakingly restored and repurposed in an on-site workshop to create a three-roomed stay. The first thing that hits you when you step inside is the smell of wood, heady and intoxicating, all tangled up with the smoke from the stove. Planks crisscross the space in a way that’s cosy rather than claustrophobic, and the wood appears ink-marbled, a mixture of dark brown and orange. What is not original is repurposed from the owners’ reclamation yard and the space feels ancient. It creaks like old bones – as if the framework is still holding on to its secrets. When you fling open the back doors, there is nothing to see but the whispering hornbeams and a swan, silently swimming across leaf-speckled water. No WiFi, no signal and no strange appliances – you could be in the Old West, snuggled safely inside before the gold rush begins.
For many, travel means transporting from one site to the next. You get more ticks for the fewer hours spent in your hotel room. At Settle, you cannot help but slow down. All that’s required of you is to just be. As the kettle whistles, I shuffle in slippers to the kitchen – a stylish extension that’s been added to the carriage. Out of the window, I can see a Muntjac, a deer that resembles an oversized rabbit and a basket, left for us on the woodpile. I bring it inside and uncover the white linen to find fresh eggs, bread and bottled milk. I make a breakfast of butter-yellow scramble on toast, laid out on wooden plates with a steaming mug of coffee. Art in Settle is functional – vintage ceramics create vases for flowers or vessels for drinking and the antique furniture plays its purpose. Our day doesn’t start until past noon.
We make our way from the parkland to the coast. Our sail with The Coastal Exploration Company starts at 3 p.m. from Wells-next-the-Sea. We meet our skipper, Colin Howell close to The Granary, a once-maltster towering above the harbour, with a top floor section that teeters away from the main building like an extended limb. The Coastal Exploration Company operates three traditional North Norfolk fishing boats, using wind to power visitors through the ever-changing salt marsh. We were spending the evening in My Girls, a crab boat with painted blue sides and red sails. “The simple lug rig means there’s no boom to knock fishermen into the challenging seas”, the company founder, Henry Chamberlain explains. The sea here can be unforgiving, with the wind whipping up violent swells onto the shifting sandbanks – the salt marsh acts as a buffer between land and sea.
While we wait for the tide to fill the salt marsh’s creeks, we motor around the headline to see Wells’s multi-coloured beach huts. Candy-striped and various heights, the huts balance tipsily on stilts in front of lines of Corsica pine. A seal surfaces from the wind-kicked waves and looks at us puppy-eyed and docile. We turn back with the low-flying pink-footed geese and make our way inland. As we enter the creeks, we hoist the sails so the breeze can gently guide us. It isn’t easy. The boat gets stuck in the shallow sands and twists this way and that before finally breaking free. There is no tiller, so you change direction by tugging on the sail. As we slowly skim through the web of waterways, the sun sinks beneath the grasses and oystercatcher cries. The water mirrors the blue sky, and there is a ribbon of gold – a flat wilderness stretching out as far as the eye can see, bruising yellow, orange and pink.
As the round-faced moon gets ever brighter, we cast the anchor over the side. Colin warms up soup over a portable stove, and we break apart crusty sourdough and carve out thick chunks of cheese. As well as offering coastal adventures and wellness experiences, another strand of the business is to deliver cargo, by wind, along the coast. “With consumers becoming increasingly environmentally astute”, Henry tells me. “It is not enough that goods are made sustainably, we must also think about how they’re transported.” The food they serve to us is local and lovingly made. But there’s now a winter’s chill in the air that bites at our hands and tugs at the blankets, so we motor back to the harbour with the moonlight casting a silver ribbon in our wake. Once back at our home for the weekend, we down beer on the decking beside a crackling fire pit. Wood smoke billows out of the carriage chimney and into the star-studded sky. Then we head inside, add more logs to the stove and settle down.
Settle will be opening once more in July - to learn more or book a cabin, click here.
