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50 free Norfolk trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Norfolk is the county that is 'very flat' only on the map. Its coast faces three ways, its biggest lakes turned out to be man-made, and its capital once claimed a pub for every day of the year. Few English counties pack in so many stories that sound invented and turn out to be true. These 50 questions range across Norwich and its cathedral, castle and football club, the Broads and the north coast, the royal estate at Sandringham, the market towns of Thetford, Swaffham and King's Lynn, and the writers, admirals, reformers and comic creations the county has produced. It suits pub quiz hosts, anyone who grew up in Norfolk and wants to test the family, and visitors curious about what lies beyond the beaches. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you leave knowing a little more than you arrived with.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which condiment has Colman's of Norwich milled since Jeremiah Colman set up at Stoke Holy Cross mill in 1814?
Mustard
Mustard got its Colman's tang from blending brown and white seeds, milled at Stoke Holy Cross until 1862. Unilever has owned the brand since 1995.
Q 02Which comedian plays Alan Partridge, the Norwich radio host who lives in a roadside hotel pitching TV ideas?
Steve Coogan
Steve Coogan has played Partridge since the radio show On the Hour in 1991, and the sitcom I'm Alan Partridge earned two BAFTA awards.
Q 03Which birds did Bernard Matthews rear in the 35 rooms of Great Witchingham Hall, later selling them on TV as 'Bootiful'?
Turkeys
Turkeys hatched in the dining room while Matthews and his wife lived in two unheated rooms of the hall. His own 1980 advert put the Norfolk-accented 'Bootiful' into the national consciousness.
Q 04Which Dickens novel uses Great Yarmouth as a key setting, a town he called 'the finest place in the universe'?
David Copperfield
David Copperfield was written partly at the Royal Hotel on Yarmouth's Marine Parade, where Dickens stayed while working on it.
Q 05Under 'Sandringham time', begun by the future Edward VII to lengthen shooting days, how were estate clocks set?
Half an hour ahead of GMT
Half an hour ahead of GMT bought daylight for shoots that ran from October to February, and the custom lasted until 1936. Queen Victoria had the clocks reset on her visits, calling it 'a wicked lie'.
Q 06Norwich Castle's Norman keep served what purpose from 1220 until 1887, seven years before it became a museum?
A gaol
A gaol, or prison, occupied the keep for more than 650 years before the Norwich Museum moved in during 1894. The keep and its old prison wings are Grade I listed.
Q 07Which north Norfolk village has Britain's only independently run lighthouse, East Anglia's oldest still working?
Happisburgh
Happisburgh's light is kept by a local trust created by its own Act of Parliament in 1990.
Q 08Despite its name, Wells-next-the-Sea in north Norfolk now sits roughly how far from the North Sea after silting?
About a mile
About a mile of marsh and a confined channel now separate the town from open water, after a mile-long bank built in 1859 reclaimed some 800 hectares of saltmarsh.
Q 09Which Norfolk resort, unusually for a town on England's east coast, has a seafront facing west across The Wash?
Hunstanton
Hunstanton's beach cliffs are striped in orange carrstone, red chalk and white chalk, stacked one above the other.
Q 10Which BBC sitcom shot its exteriors in Thetford, whose buildings doubled for the seaside town of Walmington-on-Sea?
Dad's Army
Dad's Army is remembered in the town by a museum housed in part of Thetford Guildhall.
Q 11Which political radical, active in both the American and French revolutions, was born in Thetford, Norfolk, in 1737?
Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense argued for American independence and whose Rights of Man answered Edmund Burke, is commemorated by a statue in Thetford.
Q 12Norwich City's nickname honours the local history of breeding which bird, perched on a ball in the club badge?
Canary
Canary breeding in the area gave the club both its nickname and its traditional yellow-and-green kit.
Q 13In the 1993–94 UEFA Cup, Norwich City became the only English club to win at the Olympiastadion against which side?
Bayern Munich
Q 21Which Wymondham farmer led the 1549 rebels who camped on Mousehold Heath and seized Norwich over land enclosures?
Robert Kett
Robert Kett was about 57 and one of Wymondham's wealthier farmers, and an oak named after him still stands beside the B1172 near Hethersett.
Q 22What did 16th-century Norwich call the Dutch and Flemish Protestant refugees who became a third of its population?
The Strangers
The Strangers fled Catholic persecution, with the people of Ypres in particular choosing Norwich, and the city's Strangers' Hall keeps the name.
Q 23What was dug from Grime's Graves, the complex of Neolithic mine shafts in Norfolk's Breckland near Brandon?
Flint
Bayern Munich fell to Norwich in the club's only European campaign, which ended in the third round.
Q 14Which University of East Anglia building, designed by Norman Foster, appears in Avengers: Age of Ultron?
The Sainsbury Centre
The Sainsbury Centre also hosted scenes for Ant-Man, Captain America: Civil War and Spider-Man: Homecoming, all shot in the mid-2010s.
Q 15Which prison reformer, born into Norwich's Quaker Gurney family in 1780, was on the Bank of England £5 note until 2017?
Elizabeth Fry
Elizabeth Fry grew up at Earlham Hall, a house that now belongs to the University of East Anglia.
Q 16Which Swardeston-born nurse was executed in occupied Belgium in 1915 for helping some 200 Allied soldiers escape?
Edith Cavell
Edith Cavell treated wounded soldiers from both sides without discrimination, and her grave lies in the grounds of Norwich Cathedral.
Q 17Anna Sewell, born in Great Yarmouth in 1820, wrote which novel about a horse, the only book she ever published?
Black Beauty
Black Beauty came from a writer who left Norfolk for London as a baby and died back at Old Catton, near Norwich, in 1878.
Q 18Which sports-car maker founded by Colin Chapman moved in 1966 to Hethel, a former airfield in Norfolk?
Lotus
Lotus laid out its Hethel test track on sections of RAF Hethel's wartime runway.
Q 19Norwich Union, the insurer founded in 1797, merged with CGU in 2000 into a group renamed what in 2002?
Aviva
Aviva was an invented palindrome adopted by shareholder vote in April 2002, replacing the clumsy merger name CGNU plc.
Q 20Which medieval anchoress wrote Revelations of Divine Love, the earliest surviving English work by a woman?
Julian of Norwich
Julian of Norwich lived in permanent seclusion in a cell attached to St Julian's Church, and hers are the only surviving English works by an anchoress.
Flint was worked there between about 2600 and 2300 BC, and production may have carried on through the Bronze and Iron Ages.
Q 24What stood at the centre of Seahenge, the Bronze Age timber circle on Holme beach that the press named in 1998?
An inverted oak stump
An inverted oak stump sat inside a ring of timbers felled in 2049 BC, when the site was surrounded by salt marsh rather than sea.
Q 25Which Iron Age objects, over 150 in gold and other alloys, make up Norfolk's Snettisham Hoard, found from 1948?
Torcs
Torcs, the Iron Age neck rings, survive in more than 150 fragments dated to about 70 BC, now shared between the British Museum and Norwich Castle.
Q 26King's Lynn keeps England's only surviving warehouses of which medieval alliance of northern trading ports?
The Hanseatic League
The Hanseatic League's Hanse House of 1475 and Marriott's Warehouse are the league's only remaining buildings anywhere in England.
Q 27Which Canadian Pacific city and island take their name from a Royal Navy explorer born in King's Lynn in 1757?
Vancouver
Vancouver honours George Vancouver, who sailed from England in 1791 with HMS Discovery and HMS Chatham to explore the Pacific.
Q 28Which resort, signposted 'Gem of the Norfolk Coast', has a lifeboat station on its pier and a brown crab named after it?
Cromer
Cromer's crab fishery is the main income of its fishermen, and the pier also carries the Pavilion Theatre.
Q 29Which archaeologist, who opened Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, spent much of his childhood in Swaffham, Norfolk?
Howard Carter
Howard Carter was a distant cousin of Harry Carter, the Swaffham art teacher who carved many of Norfolk's village signs.
Q 30Which queen, mother of Edward III, lived at Castle Rising in Norfolk after her fall from power in 1330?
Isabella of France
Isabella of France extended the castle buildings and kept a regal lifestyle there, entertaining her son on several occasions.