How Hill House was completed in 1903, designed by Thomas Boardman - son of the prolific Norwich architect Edward Boardman. Thomas later served as Mayor of Norwich in 1905 to 1906, a period when his father's firm was reshaping much of the city. How Hill was a private retreat. The house perched on the rare elevated ground above the Ant, with views that took in the marshes and the working windpumps that kept the land usable. The Boardman family used it as their summer home and as a base for the small estate around it. The hill itself was the point - it gave the house its name and its view.

Boardman's Windmill near the house is a trestle or skeleton windpump - an open framework rather than a tower mill - and it is one of the surviving working windpumps that once defined the Broads economy. Clayrack Drainage Mill, similar but smaller, stands nearby. Just south of How Hill is Turf Fen windpump. Together they recall a landscape that did not maintain itself. The Broads were partly created by medieval peat-cutting, and the resulting wetlands had to be drained continuously to remain useful as grazing land. Marshmen lived in cottages beside the mills, keeping the pumps running, the dykes clear, and the marshes productive. Toad Hole Museum at How Hill is the restored cottage of one such marshman - a tiny three-room dwelling now serving as the Broads Information Centre.

Since 1984 the house has been the home of the How Hill Trust, an educational charity. School groups come here to study the Broads from one of the best vantage points the landscape offers. The trust's work is one strand of a wider Broads conservation movement that has worked to maintain the wetlands as a working ecological system rather than letting them dry out or develop. The How Hill Nature Reserve, administered by the Broads Authority, surrounds the house with reedbeds, fen carr woodland, and habitat for the cranes, bitterns and marsh harriers that have returned to the area in recent decades.

Climb to the top of How Hill and the landscape arranges itself. The River Ant winds north-south below. Reedbeds spread in every direction. The three windpumps mark the perimeter of the old drainage works. The Edwardian house behind you frames the view as Boardman intended - this was a hill chosen for its sight lines as well as its dryness. On a still summer evening, when the wind drops and the marshes turn gold, How Hill makes the Broads look like the wilderness they almost are. They are not, of course. Every reed, every dyke, every windpump arm is the product of a thousand years of human work. But standing on How Hill it is possible to feel the older landscape under the worked one - and that, perhaps, was the appeal that drew an architect's son to build his house here in 1903.