A coastal community gathered at the weekend to discuss how best to move its erosion-threatened village hall further inland.

The exhibition at Trimingham, near Cromer, on Saturday was the beginning of one of the first projects to be funded by a share of north Norfolk’s £3m “pathfinder” cash.

The money, part of a nationwide pot of £11m, was awarded to the district council late last year by the government to tackle the effects of coastal change.

This weekend villagers got together to offer their thoughts on the plans which could see a new village hall built to replace the 75-year-old Pilgrim’s Shelter.

The current building on Loop Road, erected in 1935 as a place of rest for passing pilgrims, sits just metres from the edge of the cliff and is thought to have just 20 to 30 years before it is lost to the sea.

Rob Young, NNDC’s senior coastal planner, said £200,000 had been set aside from the pathfinder fund for the project and he wanted villagers to be involved.

“We thought from the beginning ‘let’s get the parish council to get local people to take ownership of the idea’,” he said.

The exhibition gave villagers a have a say about what it should look like, what it should be used for and where it should be.

June McDonald, Trimingham parish council’s vice chairman, said the village was in need of a new hall because the existing one was too small and could not meet the needs of the community.

She said the council did not want to waste money improving a building which would have such a short life and the funding came at just the right time.

Malcolm Kerby, chairman of the pathfinder reference group and co-ordinator of the Happisburgh-based Coastal Concern Action Group, said he was delighted to see five years of lobbying Westminster finally resulting in action.

He said: “We have stopped the government dead in its tracks. We have made them rethink their route. The pathfinder is the outward and highly demonstrable effect of what we have all been doing.”

Great Yarmouth and Waveney also received a share of the national pathfinder cash.

As well as schemes to move local amenities, councils are looking at using the money to help businesses relocate, buy homes which are under threat and rent them back to the owners, and protect vulnerable infrastructure like the cliff-top footpath at Cromer.

Story by Victoria Leggett in the Eastern Daily Press