Wild Lincolnshire

The farm.

We were on a school field-week in the Lincolnshire Wolds where we expected to be heavily involved with the youngsters the whole time. As it turned out, our son Dan was perfectly happy to spend the days with his school friends and waved us goodbye each morning. So we had a few hours each day to explore rural Lincolnshire; a county we hardly knew.

The city of Lincoln is a gem; well worth further visits. The castle and cathedral are at the top of an isolated hill, so you can see them from all over the county. In typical medieval fashion, all the roads radiate from the county town so as to enable troops on horseback to defend the boundary if needed.

There is a lot of evidence of the Roman period and quite a lot from before that, in the shape of barrows and other earthworks. Place-names like Caistor reflect the Roman occupation, but Danish names predominate, along with some Norman ones like Holton-le-Clay. We loved the Danish names such as Grimoldby.

Louth is a classic market town, famed for its food, especially meats and cheeses, while Horncastle is known for its antiques. The coastal towns are either tourist resorts, like Cleethorpes or Skegness, or fishing centres like Grimsby, which is very aptly named in my view. in truth though, this is a county of villages and hamlets. I don't think the Vikings were very good at towns.

Wall butterfly.

The county naturally divides into two contrasting landscape types: the chalky, rolling Wolds and the flat coastal plain. Both have their attractions, but the most interesting, picturesque villages seem to be in the Wolds. It's all very rural; like an undiscovered Cotswolds, with thatched pubs, narrow lanes and no traffic to speak of. We explored both, just stopping where our fancy took us.

On the coast we were particularly pleased to discover Saltfleetby. The little church rivals the leaning tower of Pisa. The tower leans to the south and the chancel leans to the north, but the whole of the nave is splaying out East and West. How is it still standing?

Southern Marsh Orchid.

We found the church on our way to the nature reserve that lies in the coastal dunes. (The dunes are over a mile from the sea, even at high tide. There is no sea at low tide.) A sign said that there would be orchids and I homed in on a likely looking dune slack where I found a few Southern marsh orchids, a twayblade and some wall butterflies that I had not seen since Sussex, maybe 26 years ago. I snapped away happily, but later found thousands of orchids and dozens of butterflies along the paths.

On the farm where we stayed at Little Walks Cottage, we saw a lot of wildlife that has now disappeared from the farms around our home in Cambridgeshire. The top species was tree sparrow, which is becoming a Lincolnshire specialty as it disappears from all the surrounding counties.

Tree sparrow

We tracked the sparrows to their nest in an old out-building and found both barn and tawny owls in there at the same time. Other good farmland bird species included swallows, swifts and martins, yellowhammers, lapwings, buzzards and kestrels. On the mammal front other guests had seen deer, but we saw hares and found evidence of badgers and bats.

The Good Pub Guide helped us to track down lunch stops and we found some good pubs that did food, but we never found the sort of gourmet eateries they now have in Norfolk. The trouble is, once they discover Lincolnshire, they will spoil it and the price of even a mundane meal will go up. It would be nice to be pleasantly surprised though.

It has just dawned on me that Lincolnshire people like the place the way it is. Do they need another Burnham Market? How much do they need a Jack Wills shop? (How much does anyone need a Jack Wills shop?) This isn't Chelsea by the Sea.

The Blue Bell inn

I have to say that the people are exceptionally welcoming and we found them always ready for a chat everywhere we went in the county. Our first encounter with the Lincolnshire lingo was actually at a petrol station on the A1 at the highwayman Dick Turpin's old haunt; The Ram-Jam Inn. People seem to lack the inhibition of southerners and I love that. A short conversation can lead absolutely anywhere.

The accent here is northern with the hard vowels of the Daneland. Hanna was quite confused when the butcher offered to "coot" our pies. "No, we'll eat them cold" she said. I had to translate.

Our trip to find antiques was pretty fruitless because we had nothing in mind, not because there was nothing there.In fact, the best place we visited was an old Co-operative store that covered three floors, a yard and several out-buildings. It wasn't so much an antique store as an extreme manifestation of the owner's hoarding problem. If you have the time a patience to go through it all, this place is for you. We were just overwhelmed.






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