July 2023: war raged in the Ukraine. Fire raged in a dozen Mediterranean countries. There were unprecedented heatwaves all over the Northern hemisphere. In all the big and historic cities of Europe crowds jostled and congregated in front of any famous painting or building. So we went to Lincolnshire. I had more or less the same conversation about this project with all three sons:
“Where is it you’re going, Dad?”
“Lincolnshire.”
“Why?”
“Because nobody goes there.”
“Maybe there’s a reason for that.” (Said with half a question mark in the modern way.)
Lincolnshire is crucially, but not massively, removed from what geographers call “the coffin”, from the shape of the core of land in England that stretches from the South East up to Leeds and Manchester and which contains the overwhelming majority of the economic activity and population of the country. The county is vast: there are many journeys within it which take two hours by car and the Viking Way, the long distance footpath that winds through it, is 147 miles long. It has no motorways except for a sliver of the M180 on its northern edge, no major university (sorry Lincoln University, constituted in its present form in 2002), no football club in the Premiership or the Championship (keep trying Lincoln City and Grimsby Town) and no first class cricket. Unlike Leamington Spa where we live where the person walking past your house is as likely to be an Indian engineer or a German software designer as a Warwickshire native, it is not cosmopolitan. Almost everyone we met or heard seemed to come from Lincolnshire. I don’t approve of ethnic statistics, but the county is listed as more than 96% “white”.
My original reason for the visit was to see the Lincolnshire Wolds. I had read that they were the least visited of the fifty national parks and “areas of outstanding natural beauty” in England and Wales. On investigation and reflection this turns out to be a meaningless claim and there are other claimants. If you drive on the A631 which crosses the Wolds from Market Rasen to Louth have you visited them? But a subsidiary reason was to use the cards which we’d paid for and visit the Medieval Bishop’s Palace (English Heritage) and Tattershall Castle (National Trust).
We started in Lincoln. This could not have gone better and began by luckily finding a parking space seconds after it was vacated, The old town was busy. There the war was still on, though not raging. In the medieval streets on the hill surrounded by the castle, the cathedral and two bishop’s palaces there was a crooner singing and a ukulele band. GIs roamed the streets as did every kind of British serviceman in WW2 uniform. We spotted Winston and Clementine Churchill holding forth. A spitfire flew overhead. They call these events a “1940s weekend” and it turns out that almost every sizeable place in the county holds them. They are not about the Atlee government in the second half of the decade, but about the war when the population of 300,000 was complemented by more than 80,000 personnel from the various air forces and almost all RAF training took place in Lincolnshire. This was the second time that the area was historically important, the first being the late medieval period when the writ of the Bishop of Lincoln ran from the Humber to the Thames. This was covered by our visit to the older of the two palaces and wasn’t it nice to explore a rambling historical site where there were only a handful of other people? The new (Georgian) palace looked rather fine, but it is a place of work.
From Lincoln we went to Market Rasen. The small town looked rather scruffy and depressed though I thought the racecourse, with stands on a hill above the course, looked rather fine. So we were apprehensive about Louth where we had chosen to stay. We need not have worried: it is lovely, an unspoiled Georgian market town. The Mason’s Arms in the Cornmarket, where we were staying, is in a cobbled square approached by a number of narrow alleys. We had to park the car a good quarter of a mile away and walk. And when the cheerful and friendly lad had booked us into the hotel he left so that we were the only people in the building. After a lifetime of travel, this business of being left in charge of the hotel was a first. We had a key to the front door and a telephone number to ring in case the hotel was on fire. Though in fact there were other guests who had keys who were out at the time and some yet to arrive who had been texted with code numbers to boxes with keys in them. Looking out of the window of our room into the square made me feel at home since I am from a town the size of Louth (population 17,000). This was because people moved around fairly slowly and talked to each other as often as not. In the evening at The Ranch we ate and drank too much; my meal included a very large Boston sausage (Boston, Lincs that is, not Mass.).
The obvious way to explore the Wolds is to follow the Viking Way; it is easy to follow and is on a North-South axis. We followed it southwards from the main road. At first it was a metalled lane, though there were no vehicles at all. Then it diverted through a wood, across meadows with cattle who studiously ignored us and through the deserted medieval village of Biscathorpe. The church still stands, more than slightly sinister, ringed by rusting iron fences and dark yew trees. This was followed by a long stretch by a stream, effectively between arable fields and a wetland, then through some woods into the inhabited village of Donington-on-Bain. The surprising thing about the village was how much it had to offer compared with most villages of that size: a school that was in operation, a church that was open, a pub we didn’t visit and a post office and shop. We sat outside the shop on a bench drinking and eating ice creams in the sunshine, talking to quite an elderly lady from Sheffield who was cycling the area and surmising that the village had so many facilities precisely because it was so remote and there simply was no local town to “pop” into. In typically English fashion half an hour after we had sat in the sun we were caught out be a sharp shower.
So we had finally engaged with the Wolds and I had formed my impressions. Unlike the Cotswolds or the Yorkshire Wolds it is not really a range of hills even though they rise to over six hundred feet. Rather, it is a rolling plateau of mixed woods and meadows, but mainly fields of cereals. It is not picturesque; the main reason for this is that there are no spectacular slopes and most buildings are brick, rather than honey-coloured stone. The wildlife is nothing out of the ordinary. The gardens are as pretty as any other and the woods are as pleasantly varied in species as other English woods. What the Wolds are is very quiet and deep and, somehow, very English. In three hours walking we saw two other walkers, a pair of middle-aged men.
After a motorised potter round the Wolds we headed for the coast, specifically Mablethorpe. I had been told to expect fat and tattooed people in Mablethorpe and so it was. It’s typical Lincolnshire, I suppose; in Norfolk and Suffolk they have resorts famous for their music or literary festivals, their fine dining and even their local wine and you will find the middle classes there. Mablethorpe has amusements and chip shops and you find the tattooed and fat people there. The beach is vast and was bathed in sunshine, but there was nobody on it. It is fringed by dunes and the resort is actually behind the dunes so from the sea you would barely know it was there. In fact the beach is part of a magnificent stretch of sand and dunes, thirty miles stretching from Gibraltar point to Grimsby, but the water is cold and the wind is constant. The chip issue had been thoroughly researched and we went to the one that was the furthest inland and had the highest marks on tripadvisor as well as the longest queue. It was called Salty’s and was excellent. There’s nothing quite as good as eating haddock and chips with salt and vinegar while looking out at a blue North sea with only a modicum of sand blown by the breeze-gale into your food.
The remaining items on the Big Lincolnshire List were Tattershall Castle and some shopping. All castles are different in some way or other, but Tattershall is particularly strong on difference from the start because it was built in brick at the end of the medieval period, then “slighted” (defences dismantled) during the Civil War and has actually been a ruin for most of its history. Then just before the First World War Lord Curzon (of all people) bought it, bought back some of its contents and equipped it as “a ruin with a roof” not to live in but as a tourist attraction. It stands now as a mighty castellated tower with a 360 degree view over the wet and arable lands around. Well worth a visit and close to the Battle of Britain hangar where you can see the old planes.
And the shopping? We bought salmon and crab in Louth market and some giant free range eggs. Then we pottered round the flat vegetable fields of South Lincolnshire looking for farm shops. On the question of farm shops, as on other questions, I am accused of living in the past. About twenty years ago when teaching in Cambridge and wandering about somewhere near Ely I found a farm that would sell you a lifetime’s supply of beetroot for about 80p. But farm shops have succumbed to Gresham’s 19th (or whatever) law which says that you have to go upmarket or die and are now more interested in selling you coffee and cake (sorry, gateau) rather than beetroot. But the one we found was good value for potatoes and aubergines and had some very interesting bacon. The lady confided to us that aubergine was very cheap because nobody in Lincolnshire knew how to cook them. Purchases completed we made for Bourne, the bit of South Lincolnshire we do know because it is there that Ann’s brother Joe and his wife Wendy, very good chums of ours, live.
So – the Lincolnshire paradox. Most of the people I know are well-to-do and they travel a lot. They travel to go to festivals and conferences, courses and concerts and sporting events, to visit each other’s holiday homes or swish hotels, vineyards, fancy restaurants and a dozen other reasons which together constitute “fashion”. None of these reasons takes them to Lincolnshire – which seems to me to be a very good reason to go there.
Lincoln Allison July 2023