Edmund Nelson became rector of All Saints' Church in Burnham Thorpe in 1755. He was a country clergyman of modest means but considerable education, the kind of man who in 18th-century England produced disproportionately many of the country's admirals, lawyers, and reformers. He married Catherine Suckling, daughter of the Reverend Maurice Suckling and well-connected on the naval side - her brother was Captain Maurice Suckling, who would shortly take young Horatio to sea. Catherine bore eleven children, of whom eight survived infancy. She died in December 1767, when Horatio was nine years old. The Nelson children grew up in a rectory that mixed scholarship with grief, surrounded by the Norfolk flatness that the future admiral would spend most of his adult life sailing away from. Horatio went to sea aged twelve, under his uncle Suckling, and never lived in Burnham Thorpe again - except for one strange interval.

Horatio Nelson was baptised in the stone font that still stands inside All Saints' Church. The building sits on a Domesday Book site - a church was recorded here in 1086 - and the present fabric is mostly medieval: an arcade from the 13th century, aisles from the 14th, a clerestorey and 15th-century chancel, a three-stage west tower. It is Grade I listed. Inside, several memorials to both Nelson and his father look out across the nave. A large piece of timber from HMS Victory was set into the church furnishings as a tribute. The Nelson family graveyard is here, and Edmund Nelson's name appears on plaques throughout the church. The font that christened the future Viscount Nelson is itself a kind of monument: the place where a country boy was named before anyone could know what the name would come to mean.

From January 1788 to January 1793, Nelson was on half-pay and lived back in Burnham Thorpe with his new wife Frances Nisbet, whom he had married on the West Indian island of Nevis. The years on the beach were difficult - he was 30, restless, broke, and politically out of favour. He helped his father with the parish, gardened, and drank with the men of the village at the local pub. In 1798, after his victory at the Battle of the Nile, the pub publican renamed The Plough as The Lord Nelson in his honour. Nelson is recorded as having hosted a dinner here for the men of the village before he sailed off to join the fleet that led to that victory. The pub survives, still trading as The Lord Nelson, now operated by Woodforde's Brewery. The building dates from 1637. Walk in, order a pint of the local Wherry bitter, and you are standing on floorboards that the Admiral knew well.

Nelson's name reached unexpectedly far. Burnhamthorpe Road in Toronto and Mississauga, Ontario - a major suburban thoroughfare - was named after this Norfolk village, the hometown of a 19th-century settler called John Abelson. The link between a 131-person English parish and a six-lane Canadian arterial is essentially that one man took his birthplace name with him across the Atlantic. The village also produced William Calthorpe (1410-1494), a 15th-century knight and High Sheriff; William Nelson, Horatio's elder brother, who became the 1st Earl Nelson after Trafalgar; the zoologist Solly Zuckerman, who took the title Baron of Burnham Thorpe in 1971 (he was Churchill's wartime scientific adviser); and, more recently, the actress Miranda Raison. The village is small. Its export of names is not. Stand on the spot where the rectory once stood, look across the flat Norfolk fields, and remember that something improbable happens often in unremarkable places.