Local history on the house
This house was once a butchers shop and cottage, in 2000 it was renovated and the rear extension added using traditional materials and skills. This has successfully created a beautiful home, and a pleasant place to enjoy a break in true country reminders.
Local History Wighton
The name Wighton comes from the Old English WICTUN and means a homestead or a farm near a village.
It is now a quiet peaceful farming village with some 200 inhabitants, some of whom use their cottages as second or holiday homes.
The lifeblood of Wighton would always seem to have been its agriculture, but the earliest persons living in the district would have been nomadic and staying only for so long as it took to consume the local harvest and then to move on to another suitable locality. It was not until the Iron Age that peasant farmers are believed to have settled in East Anglia and there is evidence of such occupation nearby at places such as Stiff key and Cromer. Around 500BC there was an expansion of the Belgic tribes which absorbed the local Iceni tribe and it was their chieftains who took precautions to resist any attacks by creating camps at Warham, Holkham and Wighton. These may well have been the first permanent settlers of the district. The area around these camps would have been cultivated and the inhabitants would have spent considerable time living in the open but in times of unrest or of particularly bad weather they, and their animals, are believed to have sheltered in these camps.
After the defeat of Boadica, East Anglia is believed to have been laid waste by the Romans but they also eventually settled in the region and there is evidence of a signal station at Stiffkey and of Roman burials at Whey Curd farm. Evidence also suggests that the former arable farming was resumed and a woollen industry developed. When the Saxons started to invade the Romans left, this was around 400AD.
When the Saxons settled they are believed to have lived in wooden barn like farmhouses with the peasants occupying out roomed huts. Their crops were initially barley, oats , flax and wood. By the nineteenth century the principal crops had become wheat or barley supplemented by beans, peas and flax.