The last train of the day for Berney Arms leaves Norwich just after 10.30. That's not the 22.30 of timetablese: it's half past 10 in the morning. And if that makes this station seem rather unusual, it's nothing to what you find when you get there. The rudimentary platform, with its tiny wooden hut, which could well be labelled "Admit one person", is too short to accommodate even the two-coach number which stops on request on its way to Great Yarmouth. There's a map of the area with a pointer which says, "You are here", next to which someone has written: "In the middle of nowhere". And that's how it feels. There's no road, not even a track. Northwards, there's a path which is part of the Weaver's Way and could take you in time to the north coast at Cromer. To the south there's a grassy track which leads to the waterside.

A man with very few teeth on my train was contemptuous of my intention to get off at Berney Arms. "There was 16 or so on this train a few days ago and they all got off to go the pub," he said. "They were going to have to walk three quarters of a mile through long grass! What's the point? There are plenty of decent pubs in Yarmouth."

The question "what's the point?" has been asked about Berney Arms station ever since its creation in the 1840s. One might assume the pub was the reason for putting it there, but that isn't the case. It is there because Thomas Trench Berney, who owned the land, was ready to sell to the railway company only on the condition that a station be put there "in perpetuity".

So the station opened, with a row of cottages built alongside it, one of whose rooms served as the ticket office. And right from the start, hardly anyone used it; so much so that within a decade the company announced its trains would no longer stop there. What about our agreement? Berney protested. Ah, said the railway company, what we promised was that the station was there in perpetuity. We didn't say that our trains would stop there in perpetuity. So, after much acrimony, it was ruled that one train in each direction should stop there on Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Berney was paid £250 as compensation.

Now the service is daily again, with two trains a day (more on Sundays) stopping if asked to do so. Going out, you warn the conductor; coming home, you wave energetically to the driver. The grass path that runs south of the railway (the long grass is a fiction) takes you first to Berney Arms windmill, sometimes open to the public, they say, though it wasn't when I was there, and then to the waterside.

So what may one do with the three-hour gap before the train back to Norwich? I walk for a while along the Wherryman's Way which follows the river east towards Yarmouth, with boats chugging by and a fine contingent of water birds on their long stalking legs massed on the edge, which dived in domino fashion into the river at the sound of a human approach. Butterflies flit in and out, and above there is the sound of what an ornithological ignoramus like me fondly supposes to be the song of the skylark.

But then beyond the meadows and cropping cows one becomes aware of the A47 highway with the traffic scudding along it, symbolising the kind of world one has come here to get away from. The walk west towards to Reedham is better: little disturbing here but for passing boats and the swoop of a swan making a kind of crash landing.

And then there's the pub, all brown and homely inside, but with seats outside where you can watch the activity on the water as the boats dislodge their holidaymaker crews in search of a pie and a pint, and people who look like habitual landlubbers establish their credentials by shouting commands which incorporate such seafarer words as "ahoy".

There were two retired railwaymen on the platform at Berney Arms when I got back, who said they'd always wanted to come here. I asked if they knew any other station in England as odd as this one and the only place they came up with was one in Wales. What's the point of Berney Arms station? I'd say it deserves to survive, perhaps even in perpetuity, as a kind of therapy for battered urbanites. But goodness knows what you do if it rains.