A Walk in English Weather heads to Lincolnshire

With a week to myself over Easter I had a decision to make. What part of the country to head for? I chose Lincolnshire because a) this place was a black hole to me – I had never visited b) I could tick another cathedral off my list and c) this place has a landscape history very different to that of my westerly upland home.

Based in Lincoln, I managed to radiate, on days out, from the north to the south of the county. I walked the Wolds from Tealby to Caistor. I bimbled about Boston, a town which grew medievally rich on Hanseatic trade. I did a ranging circuit of Frampton Marsh, tucked in the Black Buoy Sand corner of the Wash. I spent a day in lovely Louth, exploring the townscape beneath the soaring spire. I trekked, from Gibralter Point, through dune slacks and saltmarsh, until I hit Skegness, where I briefly beheld the essence of its bank holiday sights, sounds and smells, before retreating back along the deserted coast. I pottered, briefly, in Wainfleet All Saints, a small landlocked town sitting on a former shore, marked by a strand line of salt-working tofts. And I paid homage in Barton-upon-Humber to two structures – the Anglo-Saxon era church of St Peter’s and the triumph of span, countered by suspension, that is the Humber Bridge.

It doesn’t feel fair to ‘do’ a county in just one week. I am well aware of that. As a visitor, I dashed madly around a handful of places, unable to do anything more than develop a sketch of the place. In this blog I am going to present this sketchy knowledge; my distillation of the things I found most informative about the landscape, both natural and ‘built’; things that as an outsider feel to me like they help to define the history and environment of this place, though a lens of my personal interests – one that favours place and old histories, rather than one that favours people and modern histories.

7 Interesting Things

1. The Lincolnshire Wolds

I wanted to start with the Wolds, because they address the cliché that Lincolnshire is flat. It’s not. Well, not entirely. For a start, the county town of Lincoln, by regional standards is really quite hilly, with one of its most historic streets called Steep Hill. Lincolnshire’s Wolds are in fact the highest ground in eastern England between Kent and Yorkshire, but at a maximum height of 168 m asl, they are at the more modest end of the upland spectrum (Edward, 2008). They rise from the tabular ground of Lincolnshire to run for about 30 miles in a south-east: north-west direction in the heart of the county. The western Wold edge, facing inland, is more steeply scarped, and the gentle eastern side is marked by a sea-cliff, where a former shore lapped (Robinson, 2000, p41).

The geology of the Wolds is by no means uniform, but much of the top is composed of chalk and flints (LWCS, undated). Former glaciations scoured this place, but during the last glaciation, this area was free of permanent ice. Instead, periglacial activity with regular seasonal meltwater episodes created a smoothed and undulating landscape of steeply dissected valleys. The plateau of the Wolds is high grade agricultural land, albeit subject to drought because of its free draining chalk. However, around the periphery, glacial and marine clays can cause water-logging, so here the valleys are more typically damp woodland or pasture. 

I walked the loftiest, north west part of the Wolds, covering a section of the 147 mile long-distance walking route known as ‘The Viking Way’, that wends from Barton-upon-Humber to Rutland. The well-marked route rolled across open ground with views across this large county, through an expansive landscape where field walls were uncommon. Passing through Risby I encountered the Risby Flock – a breed of Lincolnshire longwool sheep, bred from historic bloodlines of a rare and native breed¹. These shaggy ‘permed’ muttons are prized, not just for their weight of wool, but for the amount of meat they provide. This flock of pedigree sheep are a reminder of the importance of the pastoral economy of the Wolds in the past, which Lord and McIntosh (2011, p26) talk about being “closely allied to the fortunes of the neighbouring marshes and fens“. Apparently, wealthy Wold farmers rented land on the seaward marshes, to graze their stock on the rich maritime grasslands. On the eastern flank of the Wolds there are numerous east-west roads and tracks, that join to the coast, serving dual purposes as drove routes and links for the regionally important coastal salt industry.

2. Sea Banks

The flat coastal plain to the east of the Wolds is an area known as the Outmarsh. Before 8.2 k years ago, the sea level was much lower, and this zone of Lincolnshire would have have been land-locked; peripheral to Doggerland, the infamous north sea territory of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers (Green, 2014). But sea levels are rarely static and by 8.2 k years ago, they rose to their highest level, flooding the Outmarsh to the edge of the Wolds where they remained high until the early Bronze Age. The sea retreated for a while, but was still high in relation to the modern shoreline, and there was yet another marine transgression in the Iron Age (Green, 2015). More fluctuations occurred during the four centuries of Roman occupation, with the shore still being much closer to the Wolds than it is now, but since then, overall, the coast has retreated eastwards, extending the area of the Outmarsh (Green, 2011). This is not a simple matter of global sea levels regressing, but is a complex story; a story that involves local complications of land, drainage, purposeful and inadvertent reclamation, and extractions of peats and minerals leading to local flooding. Lincolnshire’s coastal history is characterised by lots of comings and goings of the sea, but by the 11th century, the coast was in approximately the same place as it is today, helped to stabilise in this location by some considerable engineering.

It is obvious from this brief history of sea level change in Lincolnshire, how susceptible, and therefore vulnerable, the coastal plain is to flooding. The floods of 1953, which killed 43 people, are but one of the more recent examples of this vulnerability (BBC, 2014). The threat of sea level surges were just as real for our medieval predecessors, and this is why they built a large sea wall, the banks of which can be seen in places along the coast today. Often referred to as the ‘Roman Bank’, the sea defence is actually medieval, probably built in the Anglo-Saxon era. Simmons (2022, p4) talks about the sea banks joining from one coastal community to the next, helping to create a new shoreline dependent on human maintenance. A consequence of cementing this shoreline with the sea bank, Simmonds notes, is the increased flooding that would have therefore taken place via the creeks and channels. With the water prevented from flooding by the sea bank-protected marshes, instead, with its space options limited, the water would concentrate and surge through the creeks.

I made a point of visiting Frampton Marsh on the coast near to Boston so that I could walk the medieval sea bank. In this area the old bank is largely intact, and, with footpaths on top of it, it is a great place to explore this particular aspect of Lincolnshire history. Here I was able to do a circuit of the RSPB nature reserve where I could walk both the older bank and the current sea bank, which lies seawards of the medieval one. The medieval bank is big enough, but the contemporary one is even more enormous; in places raised to 7 m in height. With rising global sea levels, and a coastline more populated and developed than ever, the seaboard of Lincolnshire is destined to continue the pattern, with more money having to be sunk into defences to mitigate the risk.

3. Salt and Marsh

Lincolnshire’s vulnerable low lying coast – which runs a distance of fifty miles – as we have seen, is protected by a sea bank. In front of the bank are natural areas of dunes, salt marsh and fen. Behind lies town, and industry and mile upon mile of agricultural land, ditched and drained and pumped to keep the water low. Historically this drainage was overseen by the ‘Court of Sewers’.

The sea bank of Lincolnshire has a big landscape impact; a dividing line up to which development presses its nose. In the past this coast would have looked very different. Before the sea bank, the divisions between sea and land would have been ragged and unstable. The area of wetland would have been considerably more extensive, whilst offshore, the coast was dotted with numerous low lying islands (Green, 2017). The coastal zone would have presented a far greater and more diverse range of wetland habitats than today’s landscape; acre upon acre – not quite land, nor quite water.

In today’s landscape, fertile arable farming is a main driver of the economy, but roll away the drainage and sea defences, and this arable landscape would not have been possible. Instead, the Lincolnshire coastal landscape of the past was one that supported an economy of salt making, salt-marsh grazing, and eel trapping. Of these, the salt industry left the biggest physical impact, with mounds of waste accruing yearly, credited as being partly responsible for the reclamation story of the Lincolnshire marshes (Green, 212, p103; Simmonds, 2022, p21).

Simmons (2022, p 21) explains what this salt harvesting entailed, in a process called ‘sleeching’. An area known as a ‘sandacre’ would have been marked out at the back of a salt-marsh or shoreline. A depression was made on the surface, or it was raked, to make an area for high spring-tide water to settle. When these high tides had retreated the sand-silt mix was scraped up using a mold-board, pulled by oxen, to make a pile of silt known as ‘sleech’. The sleech was then boiled with water in a boiling house called a ‘salt-cote’ fuelled, typically, by the abundant fen peat. The waste product – big mounds of silty spoil – was referred to as a toft (an Old Norse word).

All around the coast evidence of this vitally important industry is evident in ‘toft’ and ‘salt’ place names such as Wainfleet Tofts, Huttoft and the many places called Saltfleet. Today, some tofts are still evident as raised ground, such as that running between Wainfleet-All-Saints and Wrangle, but centuries have softened and assimilated them so that today they are barely evident to the eye.

4. Old Churches

I managed to stick my nose in six churches and one cathedral during my week in Lincolnshire. Lincoln Cathedral was obviously the most architecturally impressive; intimidating even. However, my highlights were two much smaller churches, St Peter’s at Barton-upon-Humber, and Walesby All Saints.

I wanted to visit St Peter’s at Barton-upon-Humber because it is one of the most special churches in England. St Peter’s is an exceptionally rare surviving example of an Anglo-Saxon church. Most Anglo-Saxon churches were built of wood, and those late era churches that were constructed in stone have either crumbled or been demolished, often making way for a post-Conquest structures to take their place. Fate would have it that much of Anglo-Saxon St Peter’s survives. Originally this stone church had a chancel and a baptistry, sandwiching the tower. The chancel has gone, demolished to extend the building, but remarkably, the baptistry and the tower survive (English Heritage, 2016).

The skeuomorphic² tower, raised with the addition of a Norman belfry, is notable for its masonry arcaded pilaster strip-work that decorates the exterior. It is thought that this architectural style is a relic of the transition from timber to stone churches, mimicking the structure of earlier wooden towers.

The interior of the tower and baptistry are dim, illuminated by just a few small windows. Standing within this early medieval place I tried to imagine the sensory experience of the Anglo-Saxon church. With few small windows, the space was dark and closeted. Trembling candles in this tenebrous chamber would have been more than spiritually symbolic; they would have been a visual necessity. Yet, their fluttering light and shadow would surely have charged the stone walls with godly magic. However, dark interiors and candlelight were everyday in the Middle Ages. What would have been novel in this stone built interior would have been the acoustics, with sound bouncing off the stone walls rather than damped by wood and thatch. How amazing must the resonance of voice been, reverberating in new ways in this intimate interior; giving holy songs, I can only imagine, new qualities and potency.

There is so much more to say about this St Peter’s and its surroundings. Its location is by an artesian spring-fed pond which was reputedly used by St Chad (d. 672 AD) for baptisms. The church is sited on the edge of the manor of Barton, which developed from a middle Saxon community, and which in turn had succeeded a Romano-British farmstead. In 1972 the neighbouring St Mary’s church took over as the parish church for this town and St Peter’s passed into the hands of English Heritage. This presented the opportunity to excavate the site. Not only is this church remarkable for its Anglo Saxon architecture but it has also allowed 2,750 graves to be examined spanning 1000 years of the Barton’s history, making it one of our most nationally valuable burial sites in the country. This humble Humber settlement really is a most remarkable and unique place.

Unlike St Peter’s, I didn’t set out to find Walesby All Saints but chanced upon it whilst walking the Wolds. It is one of those, not uncommon churches, that sits on high ground; a location oft favoured by early settlements. Walesby, in the north-west Wolds, is a village which, over the centuries, has shifted downslope, leaving the church physically peripheral. Eventually a new church was built in the village leaving All Saints no longer used for regular worship. Stepping inside, the interior is simple and damp. The building’s unadorned and unrestored qualities are what make it special, it being a rare example of a church that has not undergone any significant updating³.

Devoid of accoutrements, the uncomplicated architecture is able to show itself without having to compete. The north aisle is Norman, with rounded arches and circular piers decorated with trefoil leaves. The south aisle is Early English with gothic arches and octagonal piers, decorated with different designs, including a ring of faces. Human attention is hardwired to respond to the face, and so for 800 years, these medieval mugs, positioned at eyes-right when you enter the church, have been telepathically calling out “look at me” to all that enter. It is almost impossible for them not to be the first thing you look at when you step inside.

Like St Peter’s at Barton, it is not just the church of interest here. This Christian hill top has a history dating back to the Romano-British era. Close by is a buried Roman villa, yielding coins dating to c.320 AD. Nearby was found a rare Roman lead font known as the ‘Walesby Tank’ which is marked with the chi-ro symbol, a sign of early Christianity. East of the church is an Anglo-Saxon cemetery of which 20 graves have been excavated, but the full extent of the burial site is unknown. Perhaps this was the cemetery of the medieval village whose earthworks can be seen clearly in the fields next to the church? This abundant first millennia archaeology is suggestive that Walesby All Saints, whilst about 900 years old itself, has been a location of Woldian worship for most of the last 1700 years.

5. Brown’s Panorama of Louth

When I visit a town that I don’t know, my favourite thing to do is get hold of a town trail and use it to explore and learn. I think it must be the geographer in me that needs to find things out spatially. Louth offered me a very unique town trail experience.

Louth has a town trail based upon Brown’s Panorama – a bird’s eye view of the early Victorian town (LTC, undated). In 1844 the church spire was struck by lightening (the seemingly clichéd mortal risk to many a spire!). Scaffolding was erected for repairs. Local Methodist preacher and housepainter, William Brown, decided this was an opportunity to be seized. He got permission to ascend onto the scaffolding to make a series of detailed sketches, giving a 360 degree snapshot of the town. Brown transferred the sketches onto two large canvasses which were exhibited in the town in 1847 and 1856. Brown’s died in 1859 and with this the paintings disappeared for nearly a century, re-emerging in 1948, before being exhibited once more in London in 1988. The panorama now hangs in the Town Council’s Old Court Room.

What is special about the panorama is that it gives an artistic record of a townscape, and the countryside beyond, otherwise only recorded in maps and documents. It combines imagery with humanity and intimacy, to provide a unique historic artefact. Not only are the buildings rendered in accurate detail, but so too are features like gardens and park design, land use in the fields beyond, and people at work and leisure in the streets. The panorama is a joy of both landscape and social history, strewn with characters such as men repairing a road with shovels, a drunk slumped on a bench, and a young woman backing away from unwanted male advance.

A replica copy of the panorama can be seen in Louth Museum but even better, the panorama has been turned into a trail – Brown’s Panorama Trail – for exploring the town. Each information board shows a section of the painting, provides commentary on what can be seen at each location in the painting, and points out interesting features on the ground in the real townscape of the present. In 1847, when this painting was first exhibited, it would have been the aerial panorama perspective that would have been the novelty, not the depictions of contemporary buildings and people. Today, we take aerial views and imagery for granted, but it’s the historic subject matter that now holds the novelty and enchantment.

6. The Hubbard Hills and the Raging Lud

Within walking distance of Louth town centre are the Hubbard Hills – a steep sided valley where people stroll, picnic, paddle and play ball games on the floodplain. These recreational activities fool one into seeing the Hubbard Hills as a benign place. But the Hubbard Hills are a gorge. Gorges are never benign, being formed as they are, by the raging and erosive forces of floodwaters.

During the last ice age, the Wolds were ice-free but ‘eastern Lincolnshire was invaded from the northeast by ice that originated in Scotland, northern England and Scandinavia (Robinson, 200, p42). As this ice melted, the meltwater became impounded by an ice lobe blocking this valley, forming a small lake. The impounded water built up and finally broke through a chalk spur on this Wold edge. Cascading meltwater from spring thaws would have been immensely powerful, cutting through the relatively soft chalk to form this gorge, probably over a period of about 200 to 300 years (Robinson, 2000, p45). This brief episode in Louth’s glacial history created a valley of vertiginous slopes, that I guesstimate to be over 50 degrees in steepness in places.

A more recent event in Louth’s history further illustrates the power of the water in this small valley. In May 1920 a cloud burst deposited over 11 cm of rain in this catchment in a very short period of time, turning this gentle river into a violent aggressor. The rain started falling at around 2pm on the 29th and by 5pm rubbish and debris had formed a dam up-river at Little Welton, where it is accused the river had ‘not been well maintained’ (LTC, 2020). The unintended dam held long enough to impound a considerable head of water which burst through, causing a 14 foot high wall of water to surge at the town⁴. The flood waters rose rapidly, deepened by the way terraced houses and industrial buildings acted as barriers along the river corridor. The event happened quickly and, without warning, people had little opportunity to understand what was happening. The flood caused a death toll of twenty three lives and destroyed 50 houses, with a further 250 needing rebuilding (ibid). When the flood waters receded, the geomorphic damage was also evident. Gullies up to two metres deep had been gouged into fields, giving a modern day taste of the erosive forces 20 thousand years ago when the gorge was formed.

Between these stories of a glacial gorge and Edwardian flooding, the very name of the Lud speaks of its raging history. Despite in normal circumstances being a moderate river in size and flow, in wet weather its alter ego must have been well-known. It gets its name from the Old English (OE) word hlude which means ‘the loud one’, a name that must have felt very apt on the 29th May 1920. Reflecting on this Lincolnshire river and comparing it to those of my Dartmoor home, the Lud feels different. However, as I write about the Lud, I realise there is more of a connection between it and a river I know – the River Lyd that flows west off Dartmoor. Like the Lud, the Lyd is also named from the same OE root of hlude/hlyde, and the Devon Lyd, through the force of its confined waters, has also formed a much visited gorge.

7. The Humber Bridge

The Humber Bridge is a visual contradiction that seems to defy the weights, the forces, the tensions, that define its form. Viewed from a distance the structure looks almost flimsy. The carriageway appears as a mere ribbon, arcing imperceptibly thirty metres above the estuary. It spans from bank to bank, a distance of 2.2 kilometres, suspended by thread-like vertical wires that drop from the main cables. Even the two piers, which resemble rung ladders, are more gap than concrete.

However, viewed from close up, the bridge feels overpoweringly enormous. Standing beneath the four lane deck, the suspension cables are out of sight; the half a million tonnes of concrete and steel seem to float perilously above. Like a jumbo jet in flight, my rational brain knows why the huge structure stays aloft, but my emotional brain is suspicious that such engineering wizardry is possible.

The Humber suspension bridge opened in 1981 and, until 1998, was the longest suspension bridge in the world, with a central unsupported span of 1.4 km (Engineering Timeline, Undated). The reason that such a breathtaking span, with the colossal weights and forces involved, is possible, is very much due to the two main cables from which all the suspender cables drop, distributing the effort of the load. These cables are each 0.7 metres in diameter and are made from 37 strands, themselves comprised of 404 tensile galvanised steel wires. That means that each main cable is made from 14,948 tiny wires (ibid). To protect these wires from corrosion from wet and salty water the wires were covered in read lead paste and wrapped in galvanised iron. But deterioration is inevitable. Water has penetrated between the wires, particularly at low points where water can collect. Remediation work has been conducted to dry out the cables, and acoustic monitoring takes place to listen for wires snapping so everything is in hand but it does leave me wondering, what is the shelf life of a suspension bridge?

Footnotes

1 – An information kiosk and small shop sited next to the path provided facts, but more importantly, the displays made clear how passionate the farmers here are about their flock and their role in preserving this unique breed.

2 – A skeuomorph is an object or feature which imitates the design of a similar, often earlier artefact, made from another material. Design may therefore include features such as decoration, that in the original object were a design necessity but in the later one are habit.

3 – Information o Walesby All Saints was taken from the church information boards.

4 – In addition to its standard town trail, and the Brown’s panorama trail, Louth Museum has also produced a ‘Louth Flood Walk’ trail available at: https://www.louthmuseum.org.uk/downloads/louth-flood-walk-2020-Rev01.pdf

References

BBC, 2014. Lincolnshire underwater – the 1953 floods. Online article nested in > Lincolnshire > A Sense of Place. 24 September 2014

Edward, O. 2008. The Lincolnshire Wolds. Geographical Magazine. Online version.

Engineering Timelines. Undated. Humber Bridge, Kingston upon Hull, Humberside, UK. www.engineering-timelines.com/

English Heritage. 2016. St Peter’s Church Barton-upon-Humber. Purbrooks Ltd.

Green, C. 2011. The Origins of Louth: Archaeology and History in East Lincolnshire – 400,000 BC – AD 10086. The Lindes Press, Louth.

Green. C. 2014. The flooding of Mesolithic Doggerland and the emergence of Lincolnshire. Personal Website and Blog of Dr Caitlin Green: History – Archaeology – Lectures & Seminars. Sunday, 17 August 2014

Green. C. 2015. The prehistoric evolution of the coastline of north-eastern Lincolnshire. Personal Website and Blog of Dr Caitlin Green: History – Archaeology – Lectures & Seminars. Monday, 22 June 2015

Green. C. 2015. Missing Lincs? Some lost islands along the Lincolnshire coast. Personal Website and Blog of Dr Caitlin Green: History – Archaeology – Lectures & Seminars. Thursday, 31 August 2017

Lincolnshire Wolds Countryside Service (LWCS). Undated. Geology of the Lincolnshire Wolds. Produced by the Lincolnshire Wolds Countryside Service and the Lincolnshire Geodiversity Group. Information leaflet, also available online. www.linswolds.org.uk

Louth Town Council (LTC), Undated. Brown’s Panorama – The Panorama Trail. www.louthtowncouncil.gov.uk (leaflet and download)

Louth Town Council (LTC), 2020. The Louth Flood Centenary – 29th May 1920. www.louthtowncouncil.gov.uk. (leaflet)

Lord, J and MacIntosh, A. 2011. The Historic Character of The County of Lincolnshire. English Heritage Project No. 4661 Report. English Heritage and Lincolnshire County Council.

Robinson, D., 2000. Geomorphology of the Lincolnshire Wolds: an excursion guide. Mercian Geologist, 15 (1), pp.41-48.

Simmons. I. 2022. Fen and Sea: The landscapes of south-east Lincolnshire AD 500 – 1700. Windgatherer Press, Oxbow Books, Oxford.