Читать книгу Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire - W. F. Rawnsley - Страница 4
ОглавлениеCHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
In dealing with a county which measures seventy-five miles by forty-five, it will be best to assume that the tourist has either some form of “cycle” or, better still, a motor car. The railway helps one less in this than in most counties, as it naturally runs on the flat and unpicturesque portions, and also skirts the boundaries, and seldom attempts to pierce into the heart of the Wolds. Probably it would not be much good to the tourist if it did, as he would have to spend much of his time in tunnels which always come where there should be most to see, as on the Louth and Lincoln line between Withcal and South Willingham. As it is, the only bit of railway by which a person could gather that Lincolnshire was anything but an ugly county is that between Lincoln and Grantham.
But that it is a county with a great deal of beauty will be, I am sure, admitted by those who follow up the routes described in the following pages. They will find that it is a county famous for wide views, for wonderful sunsets, for hills and picturesque hollows; and full, too, of the human interest which clings round old buildings, and the uplifting pleasure which its many splendid specimens of architecture have power to bestow.
MARSH AND FEN
At the outset the reader must identify himself so far with the people of Lincolnshire as to make himself at home in the universally accepted meanings of certain words and expressions which he will hear constantly recurring. He will soon come to know that ‘siver’ means however, that ‘slaäpe’ means slippery, that ‘unheppen,’ a fine old word (—unhelpen), means awkward, that ‘owry’ or ‘howry’ means dirty; but, having learnt this, he must not conclude that the word ‘strange’ in ‘straänge an’ owry weather’ means anything unfamiliar. ‘Straänge’—perhaps the commonest adverbial epithet in general use in Lincolnshire—e.g. “you’ve bin a straänge long while coming” only means very. But besides common conversational expressions he will have to note that the well-known substantives ‘Marsh’ and ‘Fen’ bear in Lincolnshire a special meaning, neither of them now denoting bog or wet impassable places. The Fens are the rich flat corn lands, once perpetually flooded, but now drained and tilled; the divisions between field and field being mostly ditches, small or big, and all full of water; the soil is deep vegetable mould, fine, and free from stones, hardly to be excelled for both corn and roots; while the Marsh is nearly all pasture land, stiffer in nature, and producing such rich grass that the beasts can grow fat upon it without other food. Here, too, the fields are divided by ditches or “dykes” and the sea wind blows over them with untiring energy, for the Marsh is all next the coast, being a belt averaging seven or eight miles in width, and reaching from the Wash to the Humber.
THE WOLDS
From this belt the Romans, by means of a long embankment, excluded the waters of the sea; and Nature’s sand-dunes, aided by the works of man in places, keep up the Roman tradition. Even before the Roman bank was made, the Marsh differed from the Fen, in that the waters which used to cover the fens were fed by the river floods and the waters from the hills, and it was not, except occasionally and along the course of a tidal river, liable to inundation from the sea; whereas the Marsh was its natural prey. Of course both Marsh and Fen are all level. But the third portion of the county is of quite a different character, and immediately you get into it all the usual ideas about Lincolnshire being a flat, ugly county vanish, and as this upland country extends over most of the northern half of the county, viz., from Spilsby to the Humber on the eastern side and from Grantham to the Humber on the western, it is obvious that no one can claim to know Lincolnshire who does not know the long lines of the Wolds, which are two long spines of upland running north and south, with flat land on either side of them.
These, back-bones of the county, though seldom reaching 500 feet, come to their highest point of 530 between Walesby and Stainton-le-Vale, a valley set upon a hill over which a line would pass drawn from Grimsby to Market Rasen. The hilly Wold region is about the same width as the level Marsh belt, averaging eight miles, but north of Caistor this narrows. There are no great streams from these Wolds, the most notable being the long brook whose parent branches run from Stainton-in-the-Vale and “Roman hole” near Thoresway, and uniting at Hatcliffe go out to the sea with the Louth River “Lud,” the two streams joining at Tetney lock.
North of Caistor the Wolds not only narrow, but drop by Barnetby-le-Wold to 150 feet, and allow the railway lines from Barton-on-Humber, New Holland and Grimsby to pass through to Brigg. This, however, is only a ‘pass,’ as the chalk ridge rises again near Elsham, and at Saxby attains a height of 330 feet, whence it maintains itself at never less than 200 feet, right up to Ferriby-on-the-Humber. These Elsham and Saxby Wolds are but two miles across.
Naturally this Wold region with the villages situated in its folds or on its fringes is the pretty part of the county, though the Marsh with its extended views, its magnificent sunsets and cloud effects,
“The wide-winged sunsets of the misty Marsh,”
its splendid cattle and its interesting flora, its long sand-dunes covered with stout-growing grasses, sea holly and orange-berried buckthorn, and finally its magnificent sands, is full of a peculiar charm; and then there are its splendid churches; not so grand as the fen churches it is true, but so nobly planned and so unexpectedly full of beautiful old carved woodwork.
West of these Wolds is a belt of Fen-land lying between them and the ridge or ‘cliff’ on which the great Roman Ermine Street runs north from Lincoln in a bee line for over thirty miles to the Humber near Winteringham, only four miles west of the end of the Wolds already mentioned at South Ferriby.
PARALLEL RIDGES
The high ridge of the Lincoln Wold is very narrow, a regular ‘Hogs back’ and broken down into a lower altitude between Blyborough and Kirton-in-Lindsey, and lower again a little further north near Scawby and still more a few miles further on where the railway goes through the pass between Appleby Station and Scunthorpe.
From here a second ridge is developed parallel with the Lincoln Wold, and between the Wold and the Trent, the ground rising from Bottesford to Scunthorpe, reaching a height of 220 feet on the east bank of the Trent near Burton-on-Stather and thence descending by Alkborough to the Humber at Whitton. The Trent which, roughly speaking, from Newark, and actually from North Clifton to the Humber, bounds the county on the west, runs through a low country of but little interest, overlooked for miles from the height which is crowned by Lincoln Minster. Only the Isle of Axholme lies outside of the river westwards.
The towns of Gainsborough towards the north, and Stamford at the extreme south guard this western boundary. Beyond the Minster the Lincoln Wold continues south through the Sleaford division of Kesteven to Grantham, but in a modified form, rising into stiff hills only to the north-east and south-west of Grantham, and thence passing out of the county into Leicestershire. A glance at a good map will show that the ridge along which the Ermine Street and the highway from Lincoln to Grantham run for seventeen miles, as far, that is, as Ancaster, is not a wide one; but drops to the flats more gently east of the Ermine Street than it does to the west of the Grantham road. From Sleaford, where five railway lines converge, that which goes west passes through a natural break in the ridge by Ancaster, the place from which, next after the “Barnack rag,” all the best stone of the churches of Lincolnshire has always been quarried. South of Ancaster the area of high ground is much wider, extending east and west from the western boundary of the county to the road which runs from Sleaford to Bourne and Stamford.
Such being the main features of the county, it will be as well to lay down a sort of itinerary showing the direction in which we will proceed and the towns which we propose to visit as we go.
ITINERARY
Entering the county from the south, at Stamford, we will make for Sleaford. These are the two towns which give their names to the divisions of South and North Kesteven. Grantham lies off to the west, about midway between the two. As this is the most important town in the division of Kesteven, after taking some of the various roads which radiate from Sleaford we will make Grantham our centre, then leave South Kesteven for Sleaford again, and thence going on north we shall reach Lincoln just over the North Kesteven boundary, and so continue to Gainsborough and Brigg, from which the west and north divisions of Lindsey are named. From each of the towns we have mentioned we shall trace the roads which lead from them in all directions; and then, after entering the Isle of Axholme and touching the Humber at Barton and the North Sea at Cleethorpes and Grimsby, we shall turn south to the Louth and Horncastle (in other words the east and south) divisions of Lindsey, and, so going down the east coast, we shall, after visiting Alford and Spilsby, both in South Lindsey, arrive at Boston and then at Spalding, both in the “parts of Holland,” and finally pass out of the county near the ancient abbey of Croyland.
By this itinerary we shall journey all round the huge county, going up, roughly speaking, on the west and returning by the east; and shall see, not only how it is divided into the political “parts” of Kesteven, Lindsey and Holland, but also note as we go the characteristics of the land and its three component elements of Fen, Wold and Marsh.
We have seen that the Wolds, starting from the Humber, run in two parallel ridges; that on the west side of the county reaching the whole way from north to south, but that on the east only going half the way and ending abruptly at West Keal, near Spilsby.
All that lies east of the road running from Lincoln by Sleaford and Bourne to Stamford, and south of a line drawn from Lincoln to Wainfleet is “Fen,” and includes the southern portion of South Lindsey, the eastern half of Kesteven, and the whole of Holland.
In this Fen country great houses are scarce. But the great monasteries clung to the Fens and they were mainly responsible for the creation of the truly magnificent Fen churches which are most notably grouped in the neighbourhood of Boston, Sleaford and Spalding. In writing of the Fens, therefore, the churches are the chief things to be noticed, and this is largely, though not so entirely, the case in the Marsh district also. Hence I have ventured to describe these Lincolnshire churches of the Marsh and Fen at greater length than might at first sight seem warrantable.
PERIODS OF ARCHITECTURE
It would make it easier to follow these descriptions if the reader were first to master the dates and main characteristics of the different periods of architecture and their order of sequence. Thus, roughly speaking, we may assign each style to one century, though of course the style and the century were not in any case exactly coterminous.
| 11th | Century | Norman | ⎫ | With round arches. |
| 12th | ” | Transition | ⎭ | |
| 13th | ” | Early English (E.E.) | ⎫ | With pointed arches. |
| 14th | ” | Decorated (Dec.) | ⎬ | |
| 15th | ” | Perpendicular (Perp.) | ⎭ |
