Peddars Way accommodation: where to stay and how to plan it

What makes accommodation planning different here

Ordinary commercial beds, booked one at a time direct with each owner. There is no hut, bothy or trail-run system, and no package you have to buy. What there is, is very little of it: the Peddars Way crosses a thinly populated part of Norfolk and the guidebook publisher's own practical-information page says plainly that 'there is not a lot of choice along the Peddars Way, which passes through a thinly populated part of the county'. Beds cluster at four places and almost nowhere else: Castle Acre (about km 32.5 walking south, the natural halfway stop), Little Cressingham and Thompson in the middle, and the Hunstanton end. Between Sedgeford and Castle Acre, roughly 24 km, we found nothing on or beside the route at all. Several of the places a map shows as accommodation on this trail are not beds for a passing walker: one is an archaeological excavation's volunteer camp, one is an eighteen-bedroom estate let whole, one is a caravan park sold by the season. Expect to walk to your bed rather than past it, and expect a 1 km to 2 km detour off the line at Great Massingham, Great Cressingham and Thompson. Direct with each owner, by phone or their own booking page. Several of the useful places on this trail have no website at all and answer a landline, so build in a ring-round rather than an evening of clicking. The Trailblazer guide's practical-information page advises booking everything in advance, 'especially during the high season (Easter to September)', and that is more binding here than the trail's modest length suggests, because if the one bed in a village is taken the next is 10 km on. Two owners we found offer a lift to and from the nearest pub for the evening meal, which is worth asking about at booking time rather than on arrival. On a trail where most beds sit off the line, whether an owner will collect you is the fact that decides whether a bed is usable at all, so ask it in the same call as the room. The fallback if the answer is no is a bag carrier rather than a lift, and it has conditions: HikeHelp price this route south to north, from Knettishall Heath to Holme-next-the-Sea, which is the direction our line runs, so no reverse-direction surcharge applies; there is a minimum charge of two bags a day, so a solo walker pays for two unless someone else is on the route that day; bags are 18 kg maximum with nothing tied outside; and they need access to your accommodation between 9am and 5pm, which you have to arrange with the house yourself. Nothing they publish says whether they will collect from a campsite, which matters here because camping is a realistic answer to three days with this little indoor accommodation, so ask before you plan around it. Walkable all year. The ground is dry sandy Breckland and free-draining chalk, and this is one of the driest corners of Britain, so the Peddars Way holds up in a wet spell that would ruin a moorland route. The season constraint is beds, not conditions: Trailblazer notes that outside summer 'there are, however, fewer beds as some establishments shut down over the winter months'. The certificated campsite we checked at Sporle lists dates covering the whole of 2026, but small campsites in this area are the first thing to close. Little shade and few trees for most of the way, which tells in a hot spell more than in a cold one. The southern end at Knettishall Heath has no settlement of its own. The National Trail's own trail pages give Thetford station as the alternative start point, and Thetford is where the trail's southern-end beds actually are, seven of the fifteen properties on the official accommodation list for this section. The northern end at Holme-next-the-Sea is the harder one: no railway, no beds in the village that we could find, and the nearest cluster is Old Hunstanton and Hunstanton a couple of kilometres west along the Norfolk Coast Path. That asymmetry decides direction for a lot of people. Walking south to north finishes at the hard end, so book the last night before you set off. Detailed services and operators belong to the transport layer and are not repeated here. There is no right to wild camp. The National Trail's own trail-information page states that 'in England and Wales, there are normally no rights for national trail users to wild camp along the way, so seeking the landowner's permission is recommended', and Trailblazer puts it as 'technically wild camping is not permitted anywhere along the Peddars Way or Norfolk Coast Path although a friendly farmer or landowner may allow you to pitch a tent in a field'. Campsites are thin and several mapped ones do not take tents at all, so a tent does not solve the accommodation problem on this trail the way it does on a coastal path. Trailblazer's stated range for official sites is GBP 5 to 14.50 per person, seen 30 Jul 2026. If you are carrying a tent, ring ahead anyway: two of the pitches we found need a club membership or a meal bought at the bar. This is pub food country, and on the Peddars Way the pub is often the only kitchen for 10 km, so the honest advice is to settle dinner when you book the bed rather than hope. Of the kitchens we checked, one publishes an explicit vegan and vegetarian line and one publishes a separate gluten free menu and says nothing about vegan cooking, which is the usual pattern: most owners here have never written their position down either way. Vegetarian is generally easy to get with notice. Vegan is a phone call, and a shared fryer is a routine issue in small pub kitchens that seldom say either way, so if cross-contamination matters to you, ask when you order. Self-catering is awkward: the resupply gaps are long and the village shops that used to fill them mostly are not there, so a vegan walker should carry a day's food out of Swaffham or Thetford rather than plan to buy along the way. Two things about this trail's beds are worth knowing before you plan days. First, the useful ones are almost all off the line, typically 1 km to 2 km, so a 25 km day on paper is a 28 km day on the ground and the detour comes at the end of it when it costs most. Second, several owners here still work the way rural B&Bs used to: no website, a landline, a lift to the pub, a packed lunch made if you ask the night before. That makes the phone the tool that works, and it means an evening spent ringing is worth more than any amount of searching. Three pubs a walker will hear about need separating out, checked 31 July 2026 and none of it confirmed by telephone. The Old Red Lion at Castle Acre, the cheap bed and the only meat-free kitchen on the route, has carried a no-bookings notice on its own site since at least July 2026 and is marked '(now closed)' by the hostel directory that used to list it, so do not plan a night or a meal there. At Stonebridge, where the trail crosses the A1075 at about km 10.5, there is no pub: a walking company's village-by-village guide to the Peddars Way says 'There used to be a pub here, but it's presently closed', and nothing is mapped there, while a walker's account from 2017 describes drinking in it, so the loss is recent enough that older guidebooks will still send you. Going the other way, the George & Dragon at Newton by Castle Acre looks dead online because both web addresses published for it now redirect somewhere else, but CAMRA's entry was updated in May 2026 with it open daily, and the motel that shares its drive writes about it in the present tense. Ring 01760 755623 rather than judging it by its website.