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Table of Contents

By Willingham Rawnsley

I

Tennyson’s Country

Calm and deep peace on this high wold, And on these dews that drench the furze, And all the silvery gossamers That twinkle into green and gold. Calm and still light on yon great plain That sweeps with all its autumn bowers, And crowded farms and lessening towers, To mingle with the bounding main.

Lincolnshire is a big county, measuring seventy-five miles by forty-five, but it is perhaps the least well known of all the counties of England. The traveller by the Great Northern main line passes through but a small portion of its south-western fringe near Grantham; and if he goes along the eastern side from Peterborough to Grimsby or Hull, he gains no insight into the picturesque parts of the county, for the line takes him over the rich flat fenlands with their black vegetable mould devoid of any kind of stone or pebble, and intersected by those innumerable dykes or drains varying from 8 to 80 feet across, which give the southern division of Lincolnshire an aspect in harmony with its Batavian name “the parts of Holland.”

The Queen of this flat fertile plain is Boston, with her wonderful church-tower and lantern 280 feet high, a marvel of symmetry when you are near it, and visible for more than twenty miles in all directions. Owing to its slender height it seems, from a distance, to stand up like a tall thick mast or tree-trunk, and is hence known to all the countryside as “Boston stump.”

At this town, the East Lincolnshire line divides: one section goes to the left to Lincoln; the other, following the bend of the coast at about seven miles’ distance from the sea, turns when opposite Skegness and runs, at right angles to its former course, to Louth,—Louth whose beautiful church spire was painted by Turner in his picture of “The Horse Fair.”

The more recent Louth-to-Lincoln line completes the fourth side of a square having Boston, Burgh, Louth, and Lincoln for its corners, which contains the fairest portion of the Lincolnshire wolds, and within this square is Somersby, Tennyson’s birthplace and early home. It is a tiny village surrounded by low green hills; and close at hand, here nestling in a leafy hollow, and there standing boldly on the “ridgèd wold,” are some half a dozen churches built of the local “greensand” rock, from whose towers the Poet in his boyhood heard:

The Christmas bells from hill to hill

Answer each other in the mist—

the mist which lay athwart those “long gray fields at night,” and marked the course of the beloved Somersby brook.

If we go past the little gray church with its perfect specimen of a pre-Reformation cross hard by the porch, and past the modest house almost opposite, which was for over thirty years the home of the Tennysons, we shall come at once to the point where the road dips to a little wood through which runs the rivulet so lovingly described by the Poet when he was leaving the home of his youth:

Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea

Thy tribute wave deliver:

No more by thee my steps shall be,

For ever and for ever.

and again:

Unloved, by many a sandy bar,

The brook shall babble down the plain,

At noon or when the lesser wain

Is twisting round the polar star;

Uncared for, gird the windy grove,

And flood the haunts of hern and crake;

Or into silver arrows break

The sailing moon in creek and cove.

Northward, beyond the stream, the white road climbs the wold above Tetford, and disappears from sight. These wolds are chalk; the greensand ridge being all to the south of the valley, except just at Somersby and Bag-Enderby, where the sandrock crops up by the roadside, and in the little wood by the brook.

This small deep channelled brook with sandy bottom—over which one may on any bright day see, as described in “Enid,”

a shoal

Of darting fish, that on a summer morn...

Come slipping o’er their shadows on the sand,

But if a man who stands upon the brink

But lift a shining hand against the sun,

There is not left the twinkle of a fin

Betwixt the cressy islets white with flower—

was very dear to Tennyson. When in his “Ode to Memory” he bids Memory

Come from the woods which belt the gray hillside,

The seven elms, the poplars four

That stand beside my father’s door,

he adds:

And chiefly from the brook that loves To purl o’er matted cress and ribbèd sand, Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, Drawing into his narrow earthen urn In every elbow and turn, The filter’d tribute of the rough woodland, O! hither lead thy feet!

If we follow this

pastoral rivulet that swerves

To left and right thro’ meadowy curves,

That feed the mothers of the flock,

we, too, shall hear

the livelong bleat

Of the thick fleecèd sheep from wattled folds

Upon the ridgèd wolds.

And shall see the cattle in the rich grass land, and mark on the right the green-gray tower of Spilsby, where so many of the Franklin family lived and died, the family of whom his future bride was sprung.

Still keeping by the brook, we shall see, past the tower of Bag-Enderby which adjoins Somersby, “The gray hill side” rising up behind the Old Hall of Harrington, and

The Quarry trenched along the hill

And haunted by the wrangling daw,

above which runs the chalky “ramper” or turnpike-road which leads along the eastern ridge of the wold to Alford, whence you proceed across the level Marsh to the sea at Mablethorpe.

The Marsh in Lincolnshire is a word of peculiar significance. The whole country is either fen, wold, or marsh. The wolds, starting from Keal and Alford, run in two ridges on either side of the Somersby Valley, one going north to Louth and onwards, and one west by Spilsby and Horncastle to Lincoln. Here it joins the great spine-bone of the county on which, straight as an arrow for many a mile northwards, runs the Roman Ermine Street; and but for the Somersby brook these two ridges from Louth and Lincoln would unite at Spilsby, whence the greensand formation, which begins at Raithby, sends out two spurs, one eastwards, ending abruptly at Halton, while the other pushes a couple of miles farther south, until at Keal the road drops suddenly into the level fen, giving a view—east, south, and west—of wonderful extent and colour, ending to the east with the sea, and to the south with the tall pillar of Boston Church standing up far above the horizon. This flat land is the fen; all rich cornland and all well drained, but with few habitations, and with absolutely no hill or even rise in the ground until, passing Croyland or Crowland Abbey, which once dominated a veritable land of fens only traversable by boats, you come, on the farther side of Peterborough, to the great North Road. Such views as this from Keal, and the similar one from Lincoln Minster, which looks out far to the south-west over a similar large tract of fen, are not to be surpassed in all the land.

But the Poet’s steps from Somersby would not as a rule go westwards. The coast would oftener be his aim; and leaving Spilsby to the right, and the old twice-plague-stricken village of Partney, where the Somersby rivulet becomes a river, he would pass from “the high field on the bushless pike” to Miles-cross-hill, whence the panorama unfolds which he has depicted in Canto XI. of “In Memoriam”:

Calm and still light on yon great plain,

That sweeps with all its autumn bowers,

And crowded farms and lessening towers,

To mingle with the bounding main.

Thence descending from the wold he would go through Alford, and on across the sparsely populated pasture-lands, till he came at last to

Some lowly cottage whence we see

Stretched wide and wild the waste enormous marsh,

Where from the frequent bridge,

Like emblems of infinity,

The trenchèd waters run from sky to sky.

This describes the third section of Lincolnshire called the Marsh, a strip between five and eight miles wide, running parallel with the coast from Boston to Grimsby, and separating the wolds from

the sandbuilt ridge

Of heaped hills that mound the sea.

This strip of land is not marsh in the ordinary sense of the word, but a belt of the richest grass land, all level and with no visible fences, each field being surrounded by a broad dyke or ditch with deep water, hidden in summer by the tall feathery plumes of the “whispering reeds.” Across this belt the seawind sweeps for ever. The Poet may allude to this when, in his early poem, “Sir Galahad,” he writes:

But blessed forms in whistling storms

Fly o’er waste fens and windy fields;

and “the hard grey weather” sung by Kingsley breeds a race of hardy gray-eyed men with long noses, the manifest descendants of the Danes who peopled all that coast, and gave names to most of the villages there, nine-tenths of which end in “by.”

This rich pasture-land runs right up to the sand-dunes,—Nature’s own fortification made by the winds and waves which is just outside the Dutch and Roman embankments, and serves better than all the works of man to keep out the waters of the North Sea from the low-lying levels of the Marsh and Fen.

The lines in the “Lotos-Eaters”:

They sat them down upon the yellow sand

Between the sun and moon upon the shore,

describes what the Poet might at any time of full moon have seen from that “sand-built ridge” with the red sun setting over the wide marsh, and the full moon rising out of the eastern sea; and “The wide winged sunset of the misty marsh” recalls one of the most noticeable features of that particular locality, where, across the limitless windy plain, the sun would set in regal splendour; and when “cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn” his rising over the sea would be equally magnificent in colour.

Having crossed the “Marsh” by a raised road with deep wide dykes on either side, and no vestige of hedge or tree in sight, except where a row of black poplars or aspens form a screen from the searching wind round a group of the plainest of farm buildings, red brick with roofing of black glazed pan-tiles, you come to the once tiny village of Mablethorpe, sheltering right under the sea-bank, the wind-blown sands of which are held together by the penetrating roots of the tussocks of long, coarse, sharp-edged grass, and the prickly bushes of sea buckthorn, gray-leaved and orange-berried.

You top the sand-ridge, and below, to right and left, far as eye can see, stretch the flat, brown sands. Across these the tide, which at the full of the moon comes right up to the barrier, goes out for three-quarters of a mile; of this the latter half is left by the shallow wavelets all ribbed, as you see it on the ripple-marked stone of the Horsham quarries, and shining with the bright sea-water which reflects the low rays of the sun; while far off, so far that they seem to be mere toys, the shrimper slowly drives his small horse and cart, to the tail of which is attached the primitive purse net, the other end of it being towed by the patient, long-haired donkey, ridden by a boy whose bare feet dangle in the shallow wavelets. Farther to the south the tide ebbs quite out of sight. This is at “Gibraltar Point,” near Wainfleet Haven, where Somersby brook at length finds the sea, a place very familiar to the Poet in his youth. The skin of mud on the sands makes them shine like burnished copper in the level rays of the setting sun, which here have no sandbank to intercept them, but at other times it is a scene of dreary desolation, such as is aptly described in “The Passing of Arthur”:

a coast

Of ever-shifting sand, and far away

The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

It was near this part of the shore that, as a young man, he often walked, rolling out his lines aloud or murmuring them to himself, a habit which was also that of Wordsworth, and led in each case to the peasants supposing the Poet to be “craäzed,” and caused the Somersby cook to wonder “what Mr. Awlfred was always a-praying for,” and caused also the fisherman, whom he met on the sands once at 4 A.M. as he was walking without hat or coat, and to whom he bid good-morning, to reply, “Thou poor fool, thou doesn’t knaw whether it be night or daä.”

But at Mablethorpe the sea does not go out nearly so far, and at high tide it comes right up to the bank with splendid menacing waves, the memory of which furnished him, five and thirty years after he had left Lincolnshire for ever, with the famous simile in “The Last Tournament”:

as the crest of some slow-arching wave,

Heard in dead night along that table shore,

Drops flat, and after the great waters break

Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,

Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,

From less and less to nothing.

This accurately describes the flat Lincolnshire coast with its “interminable rollers” breaking on the endless sands, than which waves the Poet always said that he had never anywhere seen grander, and the clap of the wave as it fell on the hard sand could be heard across that flat country for miles. Doubtless this is what prompted the lines in “Locksley Hall”:

Locksley Hall, that in the distance overlooks the sandy tracts,

And the hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cataracts.

“We hear in this,” says the “Lincolnshire Rector,”[4] writing in Macmillan’s Magazine of December 1873, “the mighty sound of the breakers as they fling themselves at full tide with long-gathered force upon the slope sands of Skegness or Mablethorpe on the Lincolnshire coast, nowhere is ocean grander in a storm; nowhere is the thunder of the sea louder, nor its waves higher, nor the spread of their waters on the beach wider.”

It is not only of the breakers that the Poet has given us pictures. Along these sands it was his wont, no doubt, as it has often been that of the writer,

To watch the crisping ripples on the beach,

And tender curving lines of creamy spray,

and it is still Skegness and Mablethorpe which may have furnished him with his simile in “The Dream of Fair Women”:

So shape chased shape as swift as, when to land

Bluster the winds and tides the self-same way,

Crisp foam-flakes scud along the level sand,

Torn from the fringe of spray.

Walking along the shore as the tide goes out, you come constantly on creeks and pools left by the receding waves,

A still salt pool, lock’d in with bars of sand,

Left on the shore; that hears all night

The plunging seas draw backward from the land

Their moon-led waters white.[5]

or little dimpled hollows of brine, formed by the wind-swept water washing round some shell or stone:

As the sharp wind that ruffles all day long

A little bitter pool about a stone

On the bare coast.[6]

Many characteristics of Lincolnshire scenery and of Somersby in particular are introduced in “In Memoriam.”

In Canto LXXXIX. the poet speaks of the hills which shut in the Somersby Valley on the north:

Nor less it pleased in lustier moods

Beyond the bounding hill to stray.

In XCV. he speaks of the knolls, elsewhere described as “The hoary knolls of ash and haw,” where the cattle lie on a summer night:

Till now the doubtful dusk reveal’d

The knolls once more where, couch’d at ease,

The white kine glimmer’d, and the trees

Laid their dark arms about the field:

and in Canto C. he calls to mind:

The sheepwalk up the windy wold,

and many other features seen in his walks with Arthur Hallam at Somersby.

In “Mariana” we have:

From the dark fen the oxen’s low

Came to her: without hope of change,

In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,

Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn,

About the lonely moated grange.

But no picture is more complete and accurate and remarkable than that of a wet day in the Marsh and on the sands of Mablethorpe:

Here often when a child I lay reclined:

I took delight in this fair strand and free:

Here stood the infant Ilion of the mind,

And here the Grecian ships all seem’d to be.

And here again I come, and only find

The drain-cut level of the marshy lea,

Gray sand-banks, and pale sunsets, dreary wind,

Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-clouded sea.

From what we have said it will be clear to the reader that while it is the fen land only that the railway traveller sees, it is the Marsh and the Wolds—and particularly in Lord Tennyson’s mind the Wolds—that make the characteristic charm of the county, a charm of which so many illustrations are to be found throughout his poems. Certainly in her wide extended views, in the open wolds with the villages and their gray church towers nestling in the sheltered nooks at the wold foot, and also (to quote again from the “Lincolnshire Rector”) “in her glorious parish churches and gigantic steeples, Lincolnshire has charms and beauties of her own. And as to fostering genius, has she not proved herself to be the ‘meet nurse of a poetic child’? for here, be it remembered, here in the heart of the land, in Mid-Lincolnshire, Alfred Tennyson was born, here he spent all his earliest and freshest days; here he first felt the divine afflatus, and found fit material for his muse: