Transcribed from the 1899 W. K. Morton edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

RECORDS OF WOODHALL SPA
and
NEIGHBOURHOOD;

HISTORICAL, ANECDOTAL,
PHYSIOGRAPHICAL,
AND ARCHÆOLOGICAL,
with
OTHER MATTER.

by
J. CONWAY WALTER,

Author of “Letters from the Highlands,” “Forays among Salmon and Deer,” “Literæ Laureatæ,” “The Ayscoughs.”
Notes on Parishes Round Horncastle, &c.

horncastle:
w. k. morton, high street.

INTRODUCTION.

The series of “Records” of various kinds which will be found in the following chapters are drawn from personal reminiscences, extending over more than half a century, combined with notes collected from many different sources during at least two-thirds of that period. In dealing with such material one is apt, even unconsciously, to be egotistical, and to linger too long and too fondly over scenes and incidents of which one might say, in Virgilian phrase, quorum pars, si non magna, at parva fui. Should the reader deem any portions unduly prolix, he will, perhaps, kindly excuse it on this score. But I have known several instances, and especially of late two in this neighbourhood, when a person advanced in years and of wide experience, has passed away, and there has been a general, and doubtless sincere, regret that he has gone, and all his store of accumulated information gone with him.

Circumstances have given me such opportunities—and enjoyed so long—of acquiring a knowledge of Woodhall Spa, and of most matters connected with it, that I am probably stating only the unvarnished truth, when I say that no one else living could bring together the varied details, however inadequately treated, which will here be found. Some of them may seem of small importance in the eyes of many—“caviare to the general”—but I have thought it better that even these minor details should not be consigned to the limbo of the forgotten, because unrecorded.

I have approached the subject from different points of view—historical, anecdotal, naturalist, and archæological, so as to cater for the different tastes of readers.

Inheriting an interest in Woodhall Spa, hallowed by cherished associations, my aim has been so to unfold its many attractions, even in beast, bird, and flower, as to communicate an interest in it to others as well.

In publishing a third issue of these Records, I am bound in duty to thank a wide circle of readers for the interest so far taken in the

work. I had now hoped to give it a more attractive form, but the low price at which a guide-book must be sold, in order to bring it within the reach of a general public, precludes a more expensive “get-up” of the volume. The only change, therefore, has been that the edition is brought “up to date” by a few necessary corrections and additions. To future readers I would only say, in Ovidian phrase:—

Si qua meo fuerint, ut erunt, vitiosa libello,
Excusata, precor, Lector amicus, habe.

J. Conway Walter.

CHAPTER I. THE HISTORY OF THE WELL.

It has been remarked that the discovery of many of our medicinal springs has been due to some romantic incident, or, in other cases, to some occurrence partaking almost of the ludicrous. At the famed Carlsbad, for instance, a princely hunter pursues his stag into the lake where it has sought refuge, whereupon the unusual cries of his hounds, too eagerly breasting the waters, speedily reveal to him the strongly thermal nature of the spring which feeds the lake, and the discovery has benefited the thousands who annually frequent that health-giving resort from almost every land. On the other hand, in the case of our own Bath, although well known to the ancient Romans—as also in the later case of Bolsover—tradition avers that an unhealthy pig, instinctively “wallowing in the mire” produced by the oozing spring, and emerging from the uncleanly bath cured of its ailment, was the humble instrument to demonstrate the health-restoring power of the water, to the subsequent advantage of suffering humanity. Other cases, more or less legendary, might be adduced; let these suffice.

The discovery, however, of the Woodhall water, if leas romantic, is no myth, shrouded in the mystery of a distant past, since it has the advantage of being, comparatively, of so recent a date, that the historian can consult the contemporary testimony of eyewitnesses still living, or of those to whom others have related the particulars from their own personal knowledge. The following account has been thus collected, and put into connected form:—

In the early years of this 19th century there lived a certain John Parkinson, Esquire, a scion of a family of position and wealth in the county, who owned, with other property, the estate of Woodhall. [5] Being of a speculative and enterprising bent of mind, it is said that he became enamoured of three ideas or projects, which he thought he had the means and opportunity of carrying out. One of these was to sink a coal mine, a second was to plant a forest, and a third was to build a city. For the last purpose he purchased from the Crown a tract of fenland,

situated between Revesby and Boston, being an outlying allotment of the original ancient parish of Bolingbroke. Here be built (about 1816) a street of houses, which he named New Bolingbroke. The speculation, however, proved a failure, probably owing to the loneliness of the position; and it was not till several years later, when the property had passed into the possession of J. Banks Stanhope, Esq., of Revesby Abbey, who spent much money on needed improvements, that the new “city” became a fairly populous village, as it is at the present time.

Mr. Parkinson’s second project was the planting of a forest. For this purpose he secured a large tract of waste moorland, in the parishes of Roughton and Kirkby, lying to the south of the present road to Horncastle, and within some two miles eastward of Woodhall Spa. This land he planted extensively with fir and oak, and in course of time they became a dense wood. This growth has since then been largely destroyed by fire, or has yielded to the woodman’s axe, and at the present time there are left not more than forty acres of the original “forest,” the rest being chiefly open moor, the whole going by the name of “Ostler’s Plantations,” Mr. Ostler being the agent employed in the work and becoming himself (as will be seen) eventually the proprietor. Thus of two eggs which Mr. Parkinson brooded over, and desired to hatch, one may be said to have been addled, and the other did not prove useful to himself:—

The best laid plans of mice and men
Gang aft agley.

We now come to the third “incubation,” which has, it may fairly be said, proved (though once more, not to himself) a “golden egg.” It has been observed that he had conceived the idea of searching for coal. For this purpose he selected a spot which has since become the site of the Woodhall well. It is said that he was guided in this by the advice of a Mr. J. Clarkson, residing at that time at Moorby, not far from his residence at Bolingbroke, and who had had some previous experience among the Yorkshire coal mines. The boring was begun in the year 1811, and was carried on under the supervision of Mr. Clarkson. When the shaft had reached a depth of about 540ft., there occurred an inrush of clear, salt water, which compelled the excavators to retreat. The work was, however, afterwards resumed, a brick conduit for the water being constructed, and so,

at the cost of great labour, and by shifts of men working day and night, without intermission, a depth of over 1,000ft. was attained. It is said (we know not with what truth) that Mr. Parkinson and his agent were induced to go on with the boring to this extent, because the men brought up in their pockets fragments of coal (which they had of course themselves taken down), and the hopes of success were thus buoyed up. When, however, this depth of 1,000ft. had been attained, and no vein of coal discovered, the unfortunate proprietor was compelled, from lack of funds, to abandon the enterprise. The boring to such a depth was, of course, a work extending over a lengthy period, and the occasional exhibition of these fragments of coal by the labourers led to false reports of success being periodically circulated. It is said that there were frequent scenes of great excitement at Mr. Parkinson’s residence; persons of all classes, even the poor, flocking thither to lend their money to him on the bare security of his notes of hand, hoping themselves to derive a large profit from the expected mine. On one occasion the bells of Horncastle Parish Church were rung in the night, announcing the joyful tidings that coal had been found. But, alas! all these hopes were illusory. Mr. Parkinson himself became a ruined man, and many a poor investor lost his all, sunk in the mine. The attempt thus proving abortive, the mine was closed, and remained so for several years, Mr. Parkinson himself disappearing from the scene, and his Woodhall property passing into other hands—the ancestors of the present owners of the estate. As the result of this collapse, other portions of Mr. Parkinson’s property in the neighbourhood also changed hands. Mr. Ostler, who has been already mentioned, had advanced to him large sums of money, and in lieu of repayment he acquired the “Forest,” since in consequence (as I have said) called “the Ostler Plantations,” and which still remains the property of his representatives.

During the making of the shaft a serious accident occurred. Two men were below in the shaft working at the bore, a man being at the top to hoist them, by machinery, to the surface, to be out of danger whenever, in the process of boring, an explosion was about to take place. They had arranged their explosive for a blast, had lighted the fuse, and then gave the signal to be hoisted up; but the man at the mouth of the mine had gone to sleep, their signal was disregarded, and they were left unable to help

themselves. The explosion took place; one of them, William East by name, was killed, and his body much mangled; the other man, Tyler, was seriously injured, but escaped with his life. [8a]

A poem was written on the occasion by Mr. John Sharpe, of Kirkstead, [8b] which I here give. The rural muse was somewhat unclassical in those days, and versions vary, but it was in the main as follows:—

It was early one morning, the 15th of June,
I was called from my bed by a sorrowful tune;
With sad lamentations a mother appeared,
And sad were the tidings I then from her heard. [8c]
“Our William,” she said, “has been killed in the pit;
Another is injured, but not dead yet.
By firing some powder to blow up the stone,
Poor William was killed, and he died with a groan.”
I put on my clothes, and I hastened away.
Till I came to the place where poor William lay.
He lay on some sacks all covered with gore:
A sight so distressing, I ne’er saw before.
I inwardly thought, as his wounds were laid bare.
How many before had been slain in the war. [8d]
In a moment of time he was summoned away;
How needful that we, too, should watch and should pray.
The Lord help us all through our hopes and our fears,
To live to his praise all our days and years.

The pit, once closed, remained so for some years, and there seemed no prospect of anything but loss accruing from the undertaking. But meanwhile, as time passed on, “Mother Earth” was in labour. The water in the shaft gradually accumulated, eventually reaching the surface, and then overflowed, running down an adjoining ditch, which skirted what is now called “Coal-pit Wood.” This overflow naturally attracted attention. Such things as “Spas” were not unknown. There was one at Lincoln, not far from the present Arboretum, and the Woodhall water being found to be salt, as was said, like sea water, several persons tried it for different purposes. A very old man (living, in 1899, at

Kirkby-on-Bain) [9a] states that he and several others in that parish used the water as a purgative (a property which it still retains). Others used it as increasing the appetite (one of the effects still remarked). Joseph East, lately resident at Kirkstead, and brother of the man killed in the pit, was sent, as a boy, to get a bottle of it to administer to a sick horse. The Squire, Mr. T. Hotchkin, found it very beneficial for his gout, and the servant, who brought the water for him, mentioned this to a woman at Horsington, named Coo, suffering from rheumatism. By the advice of her doctor, she tried the water, and was completely cured. In October, 1903, died Mrs. Wilson, mother of Robert Wilson, gardener, of Martin Dales, aged 92. She was the oldest patient then living who had baths at Woodhall before the first bath-house was built. There was only a wooden bath, at a charge of 1s. per bath. Many similar [9b] cases are recorded by the older inhabitants, which proved beyond doubt the efficacy of the water in the ailments of man and beast, especially for rheumatism and skin diseases.

This led to the re-opening of the mine shaft about the year 1824. In 1829, or 1830, a small protecting structure was erected, a windlass was put up, which was worked by a horse walking round and round, drawing the water from “the well,” as it came now to be termed, and an open brick tank was constructed in which the poor could dip, a veritable modern Siloam. [9c]

In 1834 a bath house was erected by the late Thomas Hotchkin, Esq., the then owner of Woodhall, and in the following year the Victoria Hotel was built by him, his whole outlay amounting to some £30,000. Provision was thus made for the reception of visitors, and the treatment of their ailments on a scale more than adequate for the public requirements at the time. Dr. Barton, Dr. Scott, and other medical practitioners successively resided at the Spa, but for some years longer (as will be shewn in

the next chapter) the difficulty of access prevented any great influx of patients, such as we have seen in more recent times, and a primitive state of things still prevailed, such as in these days can be hardly realised, and Woodhall Spa was probably for some years little known beyond the neighbourhood, or the county.

About sixty years ago a second well (remembered only as little more than a floating, vague tradition) was sunk on other property, not far from the present Mill-lane, near Kirkstead Station. A solitary survivor of the workmen engaged in sinking it died in 1897, well known to the writer. This well was subsequently filled in again, the water being (as was said) too salt for use. It is more probable that the water tasted strongly of iron, as the local water, found within a few feet of the surface, is generally impregnated with this ingredient, so much so, that it commonly “ferrs” water bottles if allowed to stand any time in them, this being the effect of its ferruginous properties.

An account of the well would hardly be complete without some particulars, so far as they can be obtained, of the geological strata which were pierced by the shaft. These are said to have been gravel and boulder clay, Kimmeridge and Oxford clays, Kelloway’s rock, blue clay, cornbrash, limestone, great oolite, clay and limestone, upper Estuarine clay, Lincolnshire oolite, and Northampton sands, Lias, upper, middle, and part of lower.

Of the chemical ingredients of the water, as several accounts have been given by different authorities, it is sufficient to say here that its two most important elements are the iodine and bromine, in both of which it far exceeds any other Spa. The only known water which contains a greater proportion of bromine is that of the Dead Sea, in Palestine.

CHAPTER II. LOCAL RECORDS OP THE PAST.

To those who visit Woodhall Spa, in its present advanced and advancing condition, it must be difficult to conceive the very different condition of the locality even in the middle of the 19th century. If the Victorian era has been a period of remarkable progress, nowhere has it been more so than at Woodhall Spa. The place was, in those days, only accessible with great difficulty. The roads, scarcely indeed worthy of the name, were so bad that the writer well

remembers going there, as a boy, with his father, for the first time, when the ruts were so deep that the pony carriage, a four-wheeled vehicle, broke in the middle, and had to be abandoned by the roadside, and they had to return home to Langton, distant about five miles, on foot. The road (now the Horncastle-road, and in excellent condition) passed, for a mile or more, over a tract of sandy moorland, and when the ruts became too deep for traffic on one track, another was adopted, and that, in turn, was abandoned when it became impassable. It was indeed a veritable Sahara on a small scale. The road to Tattershall was fairly good, having probably been an old Roman highway. [11a] Such roads are locally called “rampers,” i.e., ramparts. The road to “Kirkstead Wharf,” or ferry, where now a fine bridge spans the river Witham, was also in fairly good condition. [11b] The road which now runs from St. Andrew’s Church by the blacksmith’s shop and Reed’s Beck to Old Woodhall and Langton was just passable with difficulty. A small steam packet plied on the river Witham, between Boston and Lincoln, calling at Kirkstead twice a day, going and returning, and a carrier’s cart from Horncastle struggled through the sand once a day, each way, in connection with it. [11c] The condition of the road remained but little altered till shortly before the opening of the “loop line” of railway

between Boston and Lincoln in 1848. In preparation for this event the Horncastle-road was put into a fairly good state of repair. In connection with the railway two rival coaches were run from the Bull and George Hotels at Horncastle, calling at Woodhall Spa, en route to Kirkstead Station. As yet, however, the traffic was lacking to make the enterprise remunerative. The brace of coaches were then merged in one, but, for the same reason, that arrangement was presently abandoned, and for some years there remained only the carrier’s cart, slightly accelerated in speed, and even that was sometimes precarious in its journeys. The writer has found it necessary, on arriving at Kirkstead Station on a dark night, to shoulder his own portmanteau and carry it himself, for lack of other means of transport, from Kirkstead to Langton, a distance of six miles. [12] At length, in 1855, the line between Kirkstead and Horncastle, with a station at Woodhall Spa, was opened, which has proved to be one of the most paying amongst railway ventures in the kingdom, and has opened up communication between Woodhall Spa and all parts of the country. From these particulars it will be seen that, although the whilom owner of the Woodhall Estate (Mr. Thos. Hotchkin) had spent large sums of money (some £30,000 it was said) in building the bathhouse and hotel in 1834–5, yet the establishment for several years laboured under great disadvantages owing to its difficulty of access. Indeed, persons wishing to visit the Spa from a distance had, for the most part, to bring their own carriages; or, if arriving by the ordinary means of transit, and wishing to move beyond the immediate precincts of the hotel, they had to hire a conveyance from the Victoria Hotel, where the supply was very limited. Moreover, in those days some of the lighter kinds of carriage now in vogue, such as the modern dog-cart, were unknown. The chaise and the gig, large or small, were the conveyances in common use, the days not being yet past when the farmer’s wife rode to market on a pillion behind her husband.

In matters spiritual there was also a corresponding backwardness. The nominal district

of Woodhall Spa consisted of outlying portions of the parishes of Woodhall, Langton, Thornton and Thimbleby, these villages themselves being distant from four and a half to seven miles. A person standing in the centre of the cross-roads, near the present Church of St. Andrew, could have one foot in Langton (his right), the other in Woodhall (his left) and hold his walking stick before him resting in Thornton. The nearest portion of Thimbleby began some 500 yards away northward, opposite the present blacksmith’s shop. The portion of Langton extended from St. Andrew’s Church to Mill-lane, near the present Kirkstead Station. Thornton extended on the opposite, southern, side of the Kirkstead Wharf-road, from the present station, for a distance of some miles eastward, with the parish of Kirkstead running parallel to it on the south. The portion of Woodhall extended eastward from the aforesaid point at the cross-roads, and included Woodhall Spa and other land lying north and further east. In Mill-lane there was (a) a Presbyterian Chapel, served by a minister residing at Horncastle, also (b) a Wesleyan Chapel on the Kirkstead-road, the minister (a layman) being also resident in Horncastle. The only Church of England service in the near neighbourhood was held at the beautiful little church in the fields, distant about a mile to the southwest, being part of the remains of Kirkstead Abbey; but as this benefice was a donative, or “peculiar,” not under episcopal jurisdiction, [13] it might be opened or closed, and stipend paid to a minister or withheld, according to the will of the proprietor for the time being of the Kirkstead Estate. The services have, therefore, at times been performed somewhat irregularly, and it has now been closed since about 1880. Owing to the distance of the district from the parent parishes and its inaccessibility, the religious interests of the inhabitants had, at that time, been much neglected. It was said that they lived on a heath, and were, many of them, virtually heathens. And this was in truth only a slight exaggeration, for many of them attended no place of worship, they rarely were visited by a minister of any denomination, and many of their children were unbaptized; and when, a few years later, there was a resident curate, he broke down under the weight of his spiritual responsibilities amid such a population. A change, however, in this respect was effected

during the forties. The Rev. Edward Walter, Rector of Langton and Vicar of Old Woodhall, two of the parent parishes, whose name is still held in reverence among the older inhabitants of Woodhall Spa, took up the matter. He held Church of England services for a time in a room at the hotel. He then got together an influential committee, with the Honourable Sir Henry Dymoke, the Queen’s champion, at their head, [14a] and they raised a sum of money, to which, among others, the Queen and the Dowager Queen Adelaide [14b] contributed, sufficient at first to erect a school and school-house, where the services were temporarily conducted; and finally for the Church of St. Andrew and the vicarage, which were erected in 1847, the church being consecrated by Bishop Kaye, of Lincoln, on Sept. 14th in that year. The architect was Mr. Stephen Lewin, of Boston, who built several other churches in the neighbourhood, notably that of Sausthorpe, near Spilsby, which is a very fine edifice. [14c]

The Rev. E. Walter at first endowed the benefice with £20 a year and 30 acres of land, others giving smaller donations. Subsequently, when some church land was sold in the parent parish of Woodhall, which would have augmented his own benefice, he conveyed £230 a year to the benefice of Woodhall Spa; or, as it was then called, Langton St. Andrew, as the church stood on part of Langton Glebe; and this was augmented in 1889 by his son, through the sale of land, formerly Langton Glebe, to the extent of a further £112. We may fitly add that the Rev. E. Walter rests in the churchyard of St. Andrew, the place of his own creation, with the tombs of other members of his family near his own. Were a worthy epitaph needed, it might well be, simonumentum quæris circumspice. No one, in his sphere, has been a greater benefactor to Woodhall Spa. It should be added that a large Wesleyan Chapel was subsequently built; also a Primitive Methodist Chapel, and more recently a Roman Catholic Chapel, with resident priest. The various parochial sections were constituted one ecclesiastical district in the year 1854; and in recent years have, with some portions of the parishes of Kirkstead and Martin, been made one civil parish, with its Urban Council.

In the year 1884, the late Stafford Hotchkin, Esq., proprietor of the Woodhall Estate, expended a considerable sum in re-furnishing the Victoria Hotel, and making other improvements, in a costly style; and in 1887 the hotel and bathhouse, with about 100 acres of the estate, were purchased by an influential syndicate, who have since laid out a very great amount in the enlargement of the hotel and grounds, the improvement of, and additions to, the bathhouse, in supplying expensive automatic machinery for the well, and other developments for the convenience or entertainment of visitors. [15] This gave a great impetus to the growth of the place generally. Another hotel, the “Eagle,” was erected, which is excellently conducted. A very large establishment, the Royal Hotel, with winter garden, etc., has been built by Mr. Adolphus Came, embracing an area of 1,000

square yards, covered by a glazed roof, and holding out many attractions during the season; while streets of lodging houses, semi-detached or single villas, and handsome residences have sprung up in all directions. With the growth of the population came a need for enlarged church accommodation; and the present St. Peter’s Church was erected by subscription at a cost of over £1,800, and was opened by the Bishop on Sept. 14th, 1893, the foundation stone having been laid in the previous year by the Right Honble. E. Stanhope, M.P., Secretary for War. It comprised, at first, only nave and South aisle; in 1904 chancel, organ chamber and vestry were added, and the church was consecrated by the Bishop on St. Peter’s Day, June 29, in that year; the total cost being about £3,700. There is a fine organ, and peal of tubular bells. The interior fittings are mainly the gifts of generous friends. The altar rails and sanctuary carpet were given by Mrs. Randolph Berens, of London, a frequent visitor to the Spa. The very ornate reredos, occupying the whole width of the east end, was presented by Mrs. Cator, of Fairmead Lodge, in memory of her husband, the late Colonel Cator. It is of oak, richly pinnacled and crocketted. The centre panel contains a basso relievo representation of the triple Crucifixion, with the Virgin and St. John in niches on either side. Above are the emblems of the four Evangelists. The buttresses are crowned by the four Archangels, SS. Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel. Over the super-altar is the inscription, in raised letters, “And I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me”; the inscription on the wings being “Ad Majorem, Dei gloriam, et in piam memoriaun Thomœ Gulielmi Cator, qui in Christo obdormivit die xiv° Januarii. A.S. MDCCCC.” This is the work of Messrs. Hems and Sons, of Exeter. The pulpit, of handsome carved oak, executed by the same artists, was presented by Lieutenant Stafford Vere Hotchkin, of the 21st Lancers Regiment, in memory of his father, the late T. J. Stafford Hotchkin, lord of the manor.

Of this church we can only say that all true lovers of architecture must regret the style in which it was erected. The original idea, strenuously advocated by the late Bishop Suffragan, Dr. E. Trollope, one of our greatest authorities (as well as by the present writer, as patron of the benefice) was that the Church of St. Andrew should be enlarged by doubling the nave and extending the chancel. Arrangements

had been made to obtain stone for this purpose from the ruins of Stixwold Priory, of which that church was originally built. A suitable edifice would thus have been erected, in a central position. Unfortunately the Bishop died while the question was yet sub judice, and, as most persons of taste must feel, counsels less wise prevailed. The present structure of brick has been called a barn; it is of no architectural pretensions; the tracery of the windows is of the most meagre description. The ground around it is too limited to be used for burial, although the churchyard of St. Andrew is rapidly filling, and at no distant date a cemetery must be provided.

The writer, while incumbent of Woodhall Spa, in conjunction with Mr. R. Cuffe, M.R.C.S., then lessee of the Victoria Hotel, commenced, in 1873, a Cottage Hospital for the poor, on a small scale, which was largely beneficial, patients being admitted almost literally from Land’s End to John o’Groats’ house. Some left their crutches behind them, nailed to the walls of the bathhouse; and it may be added, as shewing the efficacy of the water, that cases occurred of patients who, on their arrival, could only get about painfully on crutches, but who yet, before leaving, ran in foot races at the village sports. The cottage then rented has of late years been superseded by the much larger Alexandra Hospital, a substantial building, under the patronage of the Princess of Wales, erected through the exertions of the Rev. J. O. Stephens, rector of Blankney, on a site presented by the syndicate. It was opened in 1890, and has conferred large benefits on the suffering poor. The medical officer is Dr. Williams, L.R.C.P., Ed., Brookside Cottage, by whom patients are treated with great skill. He has published a pamphlet on the Woodhall water and treatment. He is ably assisted by Mr. H. W. Gwyn, L.S.A. A pamphlet on the same subject was also published by the late Mr. A. E. Boulton, M.R.C.S., Horncastle. Mr. R. Cuffe, M.R.C.S., Surgeon-Major, has also a large residence, the Northcote House Sanatorium, for the reception of high-class patients, who are under his own supervision. He has had a large and long experience in every variety of ailment for which the Woodhall treatment is adapted, having been sole lessee of the Spa establishment from 1866 to 1883; he has written much on the subject; was himself mainly instrumental in founding the British Balneological and Climatological Society, which has as its members the

leading physicians of the chief watering places in the kingdom; and at his hands patients receive the most scientific treatment, he having been the first to introduce, many years ago, the electrolytic treatment, so effective in internal cases.

A “Home for Gentlewomen,” in reduced circumstances, and needing the Woodhall treatment, was established in 1894 by the present writer, in co-operation with Mr. Cuffe, as hon. medical officer. It is under the patronage of his Grace the Duke of Rutland, and other distinguished persons. It was at first located in two bungalows, but now occupies a roomy residence on the Horncastle-road. It has been very generously supported, and has proved a great boon in many needy cases.

The annals of the Woodhall neighbourhood are not without their tragic features; and deeds of lawlessness have occurred equal to anything of the kind recorded in modern times.

On June 22nd, in the year 1822, a young man named Stennet Jeffrey was returning from Horncastle Fair to the farm of his employer, Mr. Warrener (still occupied by members of the same family), when, as he was passing along the footpath through a part of Whitehall Wood, called “the Wilderness,” he was attacked by, as was supposed at the time, two men against whom he had given information of their poaching. They were accompanied by a female named Sophy Motley, still remembered by some of my informants as a big, masculine woman. After a desperate struggle for his life, a track being trampled down round the tree, by which he tried to elude them (the grass, as tradition says, never growing again afterwards), he was overpowered and foully done to death. His body was found thrown into the ditch near at hand, with the throat cut. They carried off his watch, which he had bought at the fair that day, and his money. A sovereign was found near the spot a few years afterwards by a man who was ploughing in the adjoining field. The present writer remembers being told in after years, by a man living at Woodhall, who was at the time working in a field not far off, that he heard cries for help, but did not know what they meant, and so the poor fellow was left to struggle unaided in the unequal conflict. The tree has been seen by the writer, round which he tried to escape. It stood at the south-west end of the path through the wood, about two miles from Woodhall Spa, and was inscribed with the rudely-cut names of many a visitor to

the spot. The parties to the murder were supposed to have come from Coningsby Moor, and this was confirmed by the fact that they afterwards stopped for refreshment at a small public house kept by Mrs. Copping, at Fulsby, which lay in the direction of Coningsby Moor. Near there some bloodstained clothes were found concealed in a hedge. A reward of £100 was offered for their apprehension. The woman Copping, at the public-house, was, it is said, fully aware of their guilt, but dared not say anything about it. The two men were convicted, and transported for life. The woman Motley was arrested on suspicion, but there was not sufficient evidence to convict her. In after years a man at Coningsby, named Paul Tomline, confessed on his deathbed that he had been a third party to the murder, having assisted in holding Jeffrey down while his throat was being cut. It is further stated that the woman, Sophy Motley, on her deathbed, said that the stolen watch would be found at the bottom of her box.

In the forties and fifties poaching was carried on in so openly defiant a manner, and on so formidable a scale, as is seldom heard of in these days. The writer was a party concerned in the following incident, not, be it said, in the immediate neighbourhood of Woodhall, although within easy reach of it. While he was visiting a worthy baronet for the purpose of shooting with him, they were informed by the head-keeper, as they met him one morning after breakfast, that he had received a private intimation that a gang of poachers, living in a neighbouring town, had chartered a special train to bring them down, on the following evening, to shoot some of the preserves, the line of railway skirting the property. We at once decided to give them a warm reception. This was not an entirely new thing for which we were unprepared, and the keeper had a most powerful mastiff, a monster Cerberus, who could plant his forepaws on the stoutest man’s shoulders and pull him down. The baronet’s only son, the writer’s great friend, with whom he had walked many a league in the Alps, and many a mile—with its “bittock”—over the Scotch moors, was “keen for the fray.” No less so was the writer. As the estate comprised three parishes, and it was not known at what point the poachers would “detrain,” it was evident that we should have an extended frontier to protect, and it was decided at once to despatch a messenger to the owner of an adjoining estate, the M.P. for the Division, asking for the loan of his keepers, to

co-operate with our own. Watchers were to be sent to various points, swift-footed vedettes, to come into immediate touch with the enemy on their arrival, and to report the direction taken by them, and their number. Everything was arranged in good time before the morning was over. It was settled that the keeper was to come to the hall at 9 p.m., when the son and the writer would be ready to join them. We were none of us to take firearms, but to be furnished with stout sticks. The evening passed slowly, in our eagerness for the “joust.” But at nine o’clock the keeper came with a look of disappointment on his countenance. News had got abroad of the preparations we had made for the gang’s reception; an ally, lurking near, had telegraphed that it would not be safe for them to venture on their raid, and the train had been countermanded. Since then the genial baronet has “crossed the bar,” as a Lincolnshire poet hath it; but of late the writer has had the pleasure, almost annually, of meeting her ladyship at Woodhall Spa. She was brought up in a parish closely connected with Woodhall, and she may almost be said to return to her “native heath” to renew her years.

The reader will please excuse this digression, as it illustrates the condition of things under which occurred the incident of local history which I am now about to give.

A no less atrocious murder than that in the Wilderness was committed, within less than a mile of the same place, at Well-Syke Wood, which again is about two miles from Woodhall Spa. The shooting of the wood belonged to the Rev. John Dymoke, afterwards the champion, who rented it from Lord Fortescue. In the year 1850, the head keeper, Richard Tasker, received a written intimation that a gang of poachers intended to visit the wood on a certain night, and the writer of the letter recommended him, for his own sake, to keep away. Tasker, however, was lodging not far from the wood, with a small farmer named Emanuel Howden, who also occasionally acted as a watchman; and the two men, accompanied by the “rabbiter,” James Donner, went to the wood, to protect their master’s pheasants. Howden hung back, not liking the undertaking; Donner went off to watch the wood from another point. Presently a shot was heard, and on Howden and Donner coming to Tasker, they found him lying on the ground severely wounded, and he died the following day. It was a bright moonlight

night, [21a] and Donner tried, for a time, to follow the poachers, but they eluded him. This occurred in a field just outside Well-Syke Wood, at the north-west corner, then occupied by William Hutchinson, grandfather of the present tenant, whose house adjoins the Horncastle-road, some two miles from Woodhall Spa. Most of the poachers were believed to have come from Horsington; two of them, brothers, named Bowring, and a third, Pearson Clarke, and another named Hinds; a man named Stennet was also arrested on suspicion; but they were all eventually discharged, there being no means of identifying them, as the murdered man was the only one who came to close quarters with any of them. Along with these, it is believed there was also a man named Joseph Kent, from Tattershall Thorpe, who is supposed to have fired the fatal shot. As Tasker approached the wood, this man came forward and recommended him to go home. Tasker called out that he was not yet going home, and that he knew him, whereupon Kent, finding that he was recognised, fined the shot. [21b]

The following is a less exciting incident. A few years later a man, representing himself as a beggar, called at Kirkstead Hall, about a mile from Woodhall Spa, asking for relief. Something was given to him, but it not being sufficient to satisfy his desires, he indulged in threatening language, unless he was treated

more liberally. At length he became so violent that the door was closed in his face, and he was told that they would fetch the constable, whereupon he went off. The female inmates, being afraid that he might return, if they were left alone, thought it safest to send for the constable, and he, with the keeper, followed the man and apprehended him. He was handcuffed, his feet tightly tied together, and put by them into a cart, in which the constable, without the keeper, drove off to Horncastle, to place him in the lock-up, then called “The Round House.” As they journeyed on their way, near the “Tower on the Moor,” the man, lying at the bottom of the cart, complained to the constable that the cords on his legs were cutting into the flesh; “Would he take them off?” adding that the handcuffs secured him fast enough. The constable accordingly got down from his seat, and took off the cords. As he was remounting, the man slipt out of the cart behind, and, bounding off into the wood, “Ostler’s Plantations,” close by, turned, as he mounted the boundary bank, defying the constable to follow him. The latter could not leave his horse, and, the man being very powerfully built, he also knew that he was more than a match for him single handed. The man disappeared. Some one coming up assisted the constable to tie up his horse and make a search for the prisoner; but all they found were the handcuffs, which he had wrenched off, lying inside the wood not far away. Two present inhabitants of Woodhall saw the constable pass their house, driving the cart with the man lying in it.

A very remarkable burglary was committed about two miles from Woodhall Spa on February 2nd, 1829, at Halstead Hall, a fine specimen of a “Moated Grange,” to which reference will be made in another chapter. It was at that time occupied by a farmer, Mr. Wm. Elsey, his wife, and farm servants. At eight o’clock in the evening, when the servant men went out to “supper up” the horses, they were attacked by seven or eight men, thrown down, their legs tied, and their hands secured behind their backs, and each was left in a separate stall. The stable door was then locked, and one of the gang remained outside on guard. The burglars then proceeded to the hall, and knocked at the back door. One of the servant girls asked who was there. She received the reply, “Open the door, Betty.” She did so, whereupon four or five men rushed into the kitchen. One of the maids escaped, and ran to the room where Mr.

and Mrs. Elsey were sitting. Mr. Elsey was smoking his pipe, and Mrs. Elsey was preparing something for supper. She saved her silver spoon, which she was using, by slipping it into her bosom. Mr. Elsey seized the poker to defend himself, but, on seeing their number, prudently laid it down. They then rifled his pockets and took his watch and money; also making Mrs. Elsey turn her pockets out. They then obliged the two to go into a small storeroom or closet, locked the door, and tied a hay fork across it. They then collected all the plate, to the value of £30, and £50 in cash; having first regaled themselves with a hearty meal. They also took all the silk handkerchiefs which they could find. Mrs. Elsey, in her confinement close by, complained to the burglars that she was very cold, and begged them to let her warm herself at the fire; accordingly, with the gallantry of a Dick Turpin, one of them brought her out, but seeing that she was noticing them, he ordered her into the store-room again, giving her, however, some greatcoats which were hanging in the passage near. When they had ransacked everything within reach, they compelled Mr. Elsey to go upstairs, one walking before him and another behind, each holding a pistol, and telling him that if he made any resistance he would be shot. They then, in the same fashion, obliged Mrs. Elsey to go up after him. The two were then locked up again, and the marauders politely wished them goodnight, and went off with their plunder, saying that if any alarm was given they would return. Mr. Elsey, about two hours afterwards, by the help of a small hammer and an old knife, succeeded in making a small hole through the brick wall of the closet, through which one of the maids was able to thrust her arm, and set them at liberty. The only article recovered was a plated silver teapot, which was found in Halstead Wood, near at hand. Outside this wood ran a bridle path leading towards Woodhall Spa, and in the course of the night the inmates of a farmhouse, standing close to this path, were disturbed by the voices of men passing by toward “the Spa.” One of these men was soon captured, and in due course hanged at Lincoln Castle on March 27th following; two more were taken that year, and hanged on March 19th in the next year, 1830. Of these two, one was known as “Tippler,” the other as “Tiger Tom.” “Tiger Tom” had been the terror of the neighbourhood, and the general opinion was that no one could take him. But

two powerfully built and fearless men, David English, of Hameringham, and a gamekeeper named Bullivant, were set to accomplish the task, and they succeeded in running their man to ground, and securing him at “The Bungalow,” a public-house on the Witham, near Boston. [24] With them was hanged another noted character known as “Bill” Clarke, convicted of sheep-stealing. His was the last case of hanging for that offence. The last of the gang was not captured till two years later. He was the one who had planned the whole affair, having formerly been a servant of Mr. Elsey, and therefore well acquainted with the premises at the Hall. He, however, escaped hanging, being transported for life, as the excitement over the affair had by that time cooled down; and, further, it was pleaded in his favour, that he had prevented a bad character among them, named Timothy Brammar, from shooting Mr. Elsey, or ill-treating the maids. Of this same Timothy Brammar it is recorded that his own mother having foretold that he would “die in his shoes,” he carefully kicked them off as he stood on the scaffold, to falsify the prediction. It is further stated that the man transported was, with two other criminals sent out at the same time, thrown overboard, as the three were caught trying to sink the vessel in which they were being conveyed “beyond the seas.” These men, with the exception of this former servant of Mr. Elsey, were all “bankers,” as they were then called, i.e., navvies; and such men in those days were usually a very truculent class. A robbery of a minor kind was cleverly frustrated in Woodhall about the year 1850. A labourer’s wife, residing at a cottage on what is now called “Redcap Farm,” had been taking her husband’s dinner to him in the fields. On returning, rather earlier than usual, she went to the bedroom upstairs. While in the room she detected the legs of a man, who had concealed himself under the bed. Retaining her presence of mind, she merely made a trifling remark to her cat, and went down again, and for some minutes made a

noise, as though busying herself about her usual household work. She presently got out of the house, and ran to some men working near. The thief thinking, by her cool behaviour, that she had not noticed him, remained still in his place of concealment; and she quickly returned, accompanied by two men, who captured him; when he was found to be a well-known thief, who had been convicted more than once of similar offences. Not far from the scene of this occurrence, another attempted robbery was frustrated. An aged couple lived in a solitary house, distant from any high road, near the wood called “Edlington Scrubs.” After they had gone to rest a couple of men broke into the house. Hearing a disturbance, the wife opened the one bedroom door upstairs, connected with the room below by a “Jacob’s ladder,” and looked down through the trap door at the ladder head, with a “dip” in her hand, to see the cause of the disturbance. She was immediately accosted with the demand, “Your money, or your life.” She replied, very deliberately, “Well, life is not worth having without the money.” One of the men began mounting the ladder, but meanwhile the husband had armed himself with a strong bill-hook, a tool for cutting hedges; he took his place by the trap door, and said to the burglar on the ladder, “I shall cut your head off if you come up here.” This position he maintained, moving his weapon backwards and forwards over the trap door, his figure being revealed to the thieves by the light of his wife’s dip, until day began to break, when, to avoid being recognised, they went off, having to content themselves with what spoil the second man could find in the room below. On another occasion, a narrow escape from highway robbery occurred in Woodhall under the following circumstances. It was at the time of the great August Fair at Horncastle, much larger at that time (in the forties) than it is at the present day; for it then lasted some three weeks. That fair has been the occasion of many robberies, and more than one murder. Skeletons have been found buried under the brick floors of public-houses in the town, being doubtless all that remained of those who had fallen the victims of the “sacra fames auri.” The principal farmer in Woodhall was riding home leisurely from the fair late in the evening, when at a point in the road between Langton and Woodhall, about two fields from Old Woodhall Church, where a cartshed then stood contiguous to the road, two men rushed out from the

concealment of the shed and seized his bridle. One of them told him roughly to give up his money, or he would pistol him. The other held up a lantern to his face, and then said, “Oh, you’re not the man we want; you may go, and think yourself lucky.” The farmer in question was not much of a horse-dealer, and would not be likely to have much money about him. The man really wanted was a well-known character, then living at Stixwould, by name Grantham, who would be almost certain to be going home with pockets fairly full, as he dealt largely in horse-flesh, and the men had probably seen him make a good bargain or two in the fair that day. The farmer, thus set at liberty, hurried to his home, only two fields distant; and, having a shrewd guess for whom they were lying in wait, he sent an active young fellow by a short cut across the fields to warn Grantham. The lad succeeded in intercepting the latter before he arrived at the point of danger; and Grantham, turning his horse round, rode home by another route, through Thimbleby, instead of Woodhall, and arrived at his house in safety, thanks to the thoughtfulness of a neighbour.

There are some good historic names among the older residents of the Woodhall Spa district. Howard is one, a name, which still stands high in the peerage of England. Gaunt is another frequent name; some of the members of the family, in the fine build of their bodily frame and their dark hair and complexion, seeming to indicate descent from ancient Norman blood. Fynes, or more properly Fiennes, is another; implying a connection with the Ducal House of Newcastle; the father of the present generation (a former tenant of the writer) having been named Charles Pelham Fynes. Monuments of the Fiennes family are common in neighbouring parishes, and they still hold considerable property in the surrounding district.

CHAPTER III. NATURE NOTES.

The great charm of Woodhall Spa is its “Rus in Urbe” character. The visitor can hardly go for ten minutes in any direction from his hotel or lodgings but he finds himself by the woodside, among the hedgerows or on the heath, where the jaded spirit, or the enfeebled frame, may draw fresh energy from the bracing air, richly charged with ozone, and even at times perceptibly impregnated with the tonic flavour of the iodine. The author of a recent publication

who visited Woodhall Spa, in 1897, says: “Woodhall is as unlike the usual run of fashionable watering places as one can well imagine. It is a charming health resort—situated on a dry, sandy soil, where fir trees flourish—there are wild moors, purple with heather, and aglow with golden gorse; a land of health, and the air deliciously bracing. I do not think (he adds) there is a purer or more exhilarating air to be found in all England, or for that matter out of it.” [27a]

Of the surrounding scenery it need hardly be said that we are not in the land of “the mountain,” though we have the “brown heath, and shaggy wood,” and occasionally, not far off, “the flood,” sung of by Scotia’s bard. But within sight are the Wolds, whose precipitous sides have, to my knowledge, astonished strangers, who, judging from the country traversed by the railway from Peterborough, expected to find the whole county as level as a billiard table. [27b] The flatness of the country, however, is amply made up for by other redeeming features. Within a mile of the Spa a view is obtained stretching more than 20 miles, with the grand Cathedral (which Ruskin says is “worth any two others in the kingdom”) crowning the “steep” hill of Lincoln on the horizon. “’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view,” says the poet Campbell; and this prospect, slightly undulating, with extensive woods barring it at intervals, and village spires rising from their midst, seen through the marvellously clear atmosphere which we often enjoy, is a sight worth seeing.

An old writer [27c] describes the air as being “crass, and full of rotten harrs”; and Drayton,

in his “Polyolbion” [28a] speaks of the “unwholesome ayre, and more unwholesome soyle”; but that condition of things has long ago passed away. Another charming effect of these distant prospects is the glorious sunsets. Kingsley, in his “Hereward the Wake,” truly says, the “vastness gives such cloudlands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else in these isles.” A writer, whom I have already quoted, says, “I am inclined to think the sky scenery, if I may be allowed the term, the finest and most wonderful in the world.” As to “its gorgeous sunsets, you look upon an atmosphere saturated with colour, so that it becomes opalesque; and the sinking sun, seen through the vibrating air, is magnificent. From the slopes of far California I have looked down upon the sun dipping into the wide Pacific, amid a riot of colour, but nothing like this.” [28b] Nor is this any exaggeration. The visitor to Woodhall may see it for himself, and the writer has often gazed upon it. Towards evening the soft blue of the distance becomes gradually lit up by the lowering sun with the most gorgeous and varied shades of purple, gold, and ruby, until he sinks below the horizon in a blaze of crimson glory. Then follow, softer, more mellowed tints of violet, pink, emerald green, exquisite greys, and varying hues of the most delicate kinds, until they slowly fade away into the shades of night, or the silvery sheen of the moon.

For the student of nature, there are special attractions in the botany of the neighbourhood; scarcely less in its ornithology. The wild, four-footed creatures also are in unusual variety; and within easy reach the antiquarian will find objects of very special interest.

In these pages it would be impossible to treat of all these subjects fully.

I will take botany first. And I would here make the preliminary observation, that, in specifying different plants to be found in the near vicinity, I shall not indicate exactly the habitat of each, for the sake of preserving to Woodhall Spa in the future some of its choicest attractions. The track of the invading tourist is too often marked by massacre. A French ambassador, describing some years ago the country life of our gentry, said that one of the first proposals, made after breakfast by the host, would be, “Let us go out and kill something”; and this national tendency has disastrously affected our Flora as well as our Fauna. A

writer has said, “There is a base sort of botanist who prods up choice treasures wantonly to destroy them. They are murderers, to be classed with those who have stamped the quagga out of Africa, or those who fly to firearms if Nature sends a rare migrant creature of air, or earth, or water, in their way.” Go through our English lakes, as the writer did recently, after not having visited them for several years, and you will find, for instance, the falls of Lodore, where once the parsley-fern abounded, now entirely stript of it. Just as—to take a parallel case—in a certain stream in Borrowdale, where some years ago the writer caught so many trout that the widow, in whose cottage he lodged, offered to keep him any length of time gratis, so long as he would supply her with fish at the same rate; now, in that stream hardly a fish is to be caught, from its so constantly being “flogged” by the tourist. The same holds good, though, so far, in a less degree, at Woodhall. “Ichabod” may be writ in large characters over the record of some of the plants once plentiful. I shall, therefore, leave the botanist, with few exceptions, to hunt out the specimens for himself, only stating that they exist. But is not this, after all, the chief charm of his pursuit to the true lover of Nature? To have everything found to hand for him may indeed lessen his labours, but it robs him of all the gratification with which he can exclaim “Eureka,” as his eyes rest upon the long-sought prize which he has found for himself. The difference between the true botanist and the sportsman has been thus defined: “The sportsman seeks to kill; the botanist seeks to find, to admire, and to preserve.” Would that it were always so. From the great difference in the soils in the immediate neighbourhood, varying from the lightest sand to the stiffest clay, or from the peat and bog of the fen to the gravel of the moor, or the leafy mould of the wood, there is also a very great variety of wild plants. The late Rev. R. H. Webb, author of “The Botany of Herts,” was some years ago a frequent visitor at Woodhall Spa, and he assured the writer, that in all his experience he had never known so large or so interesting a variety as was to be found in this neighbourhood. On one occasion the writer, collecting wild plants for a flower show, gathered, in the course of a morning’s walk, more than 110 different specimens. Probably the rarest plant was the Silene Quinque vulneralis, the discovery of which led to a lengthy correspondence, it being rarely found in England, though fairly common in Jersey.

It was growing in a field which now forms part of the garden of the Victoria Hotel. The alterations necessary to make that transformation extinguished it, or rather buried it out of sight; but as some correspondents gave instances where it had recurred in localities in which it had for years been unknown, there is no absolute reason why it should not also reappear in this case. Should it do so, we can only cry, parce, precor, to the too ruthless collector. The Osmunda Regalis, again, a few years ago was very plentiful; the writer has had plants of it which grew to be three, four, and even five feet in height, but it is now quite extinct. Not only so, but the writer, finding this to be the case, replanted some roots of it in 1897, where he fondly hoped they would escape observation, but, on going to look for them the following year, he found the soil dug up all round the place by the trespassing marauder, and not a trace of them was left.

The following plants have been mentioned by different authorities as among those which are be found. The Rev. E. Adrian Woodruffe Peacock, secretary to the Lincolnshire Naturalists’ Union, says: “We may expect to find some of the following rare plants—Ranunculus Hederaceus, Corydalis claviculata, Raphanus Raphanistrum, Silene Quinque-Vulnera (most rare), Silene Anglica (not so rare), Vicia Bobartii, Cotyledon Umbilicus, Sedum Villosum, Sedum Reflexum, Drosera Anglica, Epilobium Tetragonum, Campanula Ranunculoides. At a meeting of the Alford Naturalists’ Society the secretary exhibited the following plants, obtained from the Woodhall district, presenting a striking difference to the plants found about Alford, owing to the sandy moorland soil of Woodhall:—Calluna Erica (ling), Erica Tetralix (cross-leaved heath), Artemisia Vulgaris (mugwort). Marrubium Vulgare (white horehound), Teucrium Scorodonia (wood sage), Hydrocotyle Vulgaris (white-rot), and the Hardfern (Lomaria Spicant); also fruiting specimens of Solidago Virgaurea (golden rod), Lepidium Campestre (field pepper-wort), Cotyledon Umbilicus (wall penny-wort).”

I conducted the members of the Lincoln Natural History and Archæological Society round the neighbourhood a few years ago, in the month of April, and they reported 39 plants as being then in flower, the most interesting being Saxifraga Tridactylites (stone-crop), Draba Verna (vernal whitlow grass), Erodium Cicutarium (hemlock, stork’s bill), Cotyledon

Umbilicus (wall pennywort), and the Tussilago Petasites (butter-bur), Stellaria Holostea (greater stitchwort); also Parietaria Officinalis (wall pellitory), not yet in bloom, and in a pond Stratiotes Aloides (water soldier) in great abundance.

More recently I conducted the members of the Lincolnshire Natural History Union through the district, in the month of August, and the following is a list of their chief “finds”; Hieracium Boreale (hawkweed), Lysimachia Vulgaris (yellow loose strife), Melampyrum Pratense (yellow-cow wheat), Tycopus Europeus (gipsy-wort), Solidago Virgaurea (golden rod), Malva Moschata (musk mallow), also a white variety of the common mallow (Malva Sylvestris), the two cresses, Lepidium Smithii and L. Campestre, Sparganium Simplex (simple bur-reed) the mints (Mentha Sativa, and M. Arvensis), Lythrum Salicaria (purple loosestrife), Geranium Columbinum (long-stalked cranesbill), Scutellaria Galericulata (skull-cap), Polygonum Hydropiper (water pepper), Lysimachia Nemorum (yellow pimpernel), Rhamnus Frangula (buckthorn), Gentiana Pneumonantha (blue gentian), Erica, Cinerea (heath), Malva Rotundifolia (round-leaved mallow), Marrubium Vulgare (white horehound), Calamintha Acinos (basil thyme), Eriophorum Angustifolium (cotton grass), Narthekium Ossifragum (bog asphodel), Galeopsis Bifida (hemp nettle), Senecio Sylvaticus (ragwort), three St. John’s worts, viz. Hypericum Pulchrum, H. Quaodrangulum, and H. Perforatum, Spergula Arvensis (corn spurrey), Saponaria Officinalis (common soap wort), Drosera Rotundifolia (round-leaved sundew), D. Intermedia (intermediate variety), Epilobium Macrocarpum (long-fruited willow herb), E. Parviflorum (small flowered do.). E. Palustre (marsh do.), Circœa Lutetiana (enchanter’s night-shade), Pimpinella Magna (greater burnet saxifrage), Valeriana Sambucifolia (elder-leaved valerian), Solidago Virgaunea (golden rod), Gnaphalium Sylvaticum (high land cudwort), Hieracium Umbellatum (narrow-leaved hawk weed), Alnus Glutinosa (common alder), Juncus Acutiflorus (sharp-flowered rush), Anagallis Pallida (pale-coloured pimpernel), Pedicularitis Sylvatica (dwarf red rattle), Pinguicola Vulgaris (common butter-wort), Viola Flavicornis, also called V. Ericetorum (yellow-horned violet). [31] The Cichorium (succory) and

Parnassia Palustris (grass of Parnassus) are found in the neighbourhood. The Myrica (“Gale” or bog-myrtle) is very abundant, and a useful preventive against the moth if placed in wardrobes or drawers. Like the Osmunda, the Pinguicola (butterwort), appears to be now extinct, owing either to drainage or to the ever-offending collector. Another interesting plant which at present is not to be found, though it may at any time recur, [32] is the Holy thistle, or Mary thistle (Carduus Marianus). Formerly plentiful, a mile away from the Spa, about the ruins of Kirkstead Abbey, it has been of late years entirely stubbed up by successive tenants of the farm. There is one locality, about three miles distant, to which specimens were transplanted a few years ago, and where it still survives. It also grew not far from the church of Old Woodhall, but there also farmers’ operations have exterminated it. Called the “Milk” or “St. Mary’s” thistle, because its white-veined leaves were traditionally said to have been lashed with the virgin’s milk, it is doubtless a survivor from the gardens tended and cherished by the monk of old. The Botrychium Lunaria (moonwort) and Ophioglossum (adder’s tongue) are found within 300 yards of the Baths (occasionally intermittent for a season); the Trichomanes (English maidenhair) grows in one solitary place on the inner walls of a closed well, though entirely unknown anywhere else for many miles round. Several varieties of ferns grow very luxuriantly. Before leaving the botany of the neighbourhood, I would direct the reader to an appendix at the end of this volume, giving a list of a considerable number of plants with their local vernacular names, which was compiled for me by a naturalist, who made this subject his special study during a prolonged sojourn at Woodhall Spa.

There are several different mosses, and a great variety of fungi.

This varied flora conduces to a corresponding

variety of insect life. On one of the occasions referred to above, the following beetles were found:—Loricera Pillicornis, Geotrupes Spiniger, G. Stercorarius, Elaphras Cupreus, Leistotrophus Nebulosus, Hister Stercorarius, Aphodius Fœtens, A. Fimitarius, A. Sordidus, 22-Punctata, and Sphœridium Bi-pustulatum.

Of butterflies there is not a great variety. The Papilio Machaon (swallow-tail) used to be common about the reedy pools and bogs near the Moor; but owing to drainage and clearance none have been seen for several years. The huge heaps of the aromatic ant were formerly very common in the woods close to the Spa, but the eggs being a favourite food for the pheasant, and collected by the keepers for that purpose, there seems to be none left.

CHAPTER IV. DENIZENS OF THE WOODS, &c.—BIPEDS.

I now proceed to speak of some of the birds of the locality. And again it may be said, as in the case of the wild flowers, that, from the variety of soils, there is a corresponding abundance in the species frequenting the neighbourhood of Woodhall. Unfortunately another remark made of the flowers also applies to the birds. “Ichabod” may be written in large characters over the records of several. In the writer’s youth, an old couple lived close to the Tower on the Moor, about a mile from the Spa, in a cabin of their own construction, made chiefly of sods, then locally called “bages.” [33] Old Dawson, or “Tabshag,” the soubriquet by which he was more commonly known, lived with his wife the rather wild existence of a squatter, on the waste, under sufferance from the owner. He kept a pig, and was wont to boast that he possessed the highest pigsty and the lowest barn in the country, because the sty was a structure of his own erection, in the old brick tower, above the level of the surrounding ground; while his straw was stored in an excavation (still existing) several feet below. At that time between the Tower and Bracken Wood there was a stretch of waste land, several acres in extent, consisting of bog, interspersed with tussocks of coarse

grass, and straggling alders and birches, still known by the name of “The Bog’s Nook,” or corner. [34a] On this ground the common green plover—Vanellus cristatus—then commonly called the “Pyewipe,” [34b] bred in large numbers; the eggs were, as they are still, regarded as a delicacy, and old “Tabshag” used to make a considerable sum of money every year by sending hampers of these eggs by coach up to London for sale. So familiar he was said to be with the habits of the bird that he could tell by its cry how many eggs were in the nest. [34c] This land is now under cultivation, and the plaintive cry of the plover is heard no more, or only seldom. The plover, indeed, is still with us, but in numbers lessening every year. There are probably not now as many plovers’ nests in the whole parish as there formerly were in a single ploughed field. The writer, as a boy, was somewhat of an expert in finding these nests. He has watched the birds making them, which they do by turning round and round, with the breast or belly on the ground, thus forming a saucer-shaped hollow, in which they sometimes place two or three fibres of twitch as a lining. One bird makes three or four of such nests, and finally selects the one which, presumably, she deems most unnoticeable.

Sixty years ago black game were found on the moorland called now “The Ostler Plantations,” [34d] but though one still heard of them “in the forties,” they were then either extinct or a rapidly vanishing quantity. At the same time also the “boom” of the bittern might still be heard in the marshy parts of the same ground, but they are also now among the has been’s.

No more shall bittern boom,
No more shall blackcock crow:
For both have met their doom,
The sport of human foe.

From the character of the Ostler ground, formerly a very secluded tract of mixed wood, moor, and morass, it has been frequented by a great variety of birds. [35] The heron bred there within the last twenty years, a solitary nest remaining in a clump of trees in the south-west corner next to Tattershall, until it was blown down by a gale, and, the particular tree being shortly afterwards felled, the bird never returned. Drainage and the destruction of trees by the woodman’s axe, or by accidental fires, have so dried the ground as to reduce greatly the numbers of certain birds of aquatic or semi-aquatic habits. The coot “clanking” in the sedgy pools is no more heard. The moor-hen with those little, black, fluffy balls which formed her brood scuttling over the water to hide in the reeds, is rarely seen. The wild duck has, indeed, in one or two instances nested near a still-surviving pool within the last ten years; a nest was once found by the writer among the branches of a pollard willow, overhanging a pool, some five or six feet from the ground. He has also shot teal on odd occasions lying in the open; but both these birds are now rarely seen, and the same may be said of the snipe, “jack” and “full.” The latter were once plentiful, so that it was a common occurrence to put up a “whisp” of them, whereas now one seldom sees more than three or four in a whole season. A delicate little bird, very palatable on the table, was the waterrail, now almost extinct. The writer used to have permission to shoot along the “ballast ponds” beside the railway, and he has frequently shot them there. The woodcock is still with us. The poet painter, Dante Rosetti, kept one as a favourite pet; we of

Woodhall are more prosaic, and like to see the bird rise out of the bracken before us, and fall to our shot, eventually to appear nicely cooked on a toast before us at table. But of late years drainage has reduced their numbers. Although we could, of course, never at Woodhall, compete with the shooter on the Irish bogs, where as many as 100 or 200 are sometimes shot in a day; yet I could at one time almost always get a brace when I wanted them by trying certain spots which were their regular resort, and among my notes I find this: “Nov. 16, 1872, shot Bracken wood, got five woodcock, making 20 in three days.” [N.B.—Bracken wood, as the visitor may not know, is within one field of the Bath-house at Woodhall Spa.] Some years ago certain sportsmen (?) in this neighbourhood used to go to the sea coast every year, in October, at the time of the arrival of the first flight of woodcock (the second flight is in November), and shot them in considerable numbers, when they were resting, exhausted by their flight; hardly a creditable practice, and unworthy of a true lover of nature. A wood in Kirkstead, named “Bird-Hag Wood,” was formerly a favourite haunt of the woodcock, and I have shot many in it; but it was cleared away in the seventies. [36a] Woodcock occasionally breed on the moor, and a nest was found some years ago within 80 yards of the road to Horncastle, opposite the Tower on the Moor. Among my notes I find this: “Dec. 5, 1872, we saw about a dozen woodcock in Bird-Hag Wood, but only three were shot.”

I have just mentioned Bird-Hag and its woodcock. Pleasant memories of that wood have lingered with more than one sportsman. A former poetic owner of Kirkstead has written of it thus [36b]:—

Remote Bird-Hag, that favourite preserve,
To crown some chosen day, the choice reserve
Where noble oaks their autumn tints display,
And fern gigantic checks the sportsman’s way
But well is toil and trouble there repaid,
By the wild tenants of that oaken shade,
While rabbits, hares, successive, cross your road,
And scarcely give the time to fire and load,—
While shots resound, and pheasants loudly crow,
Who heeds the bramble? Who fatigue can know?
Here from the brake, that bird of stealthy flight,
The mottled woodcock glads our eager sight,
Great is his triumph, whose lucky shot shall kill
The dark-eyed stranger of the lengthy bill
Unlike the pheasant, who himself betrays,
And dearly for his daring challenge pays.
Small notice gives the woodcock of his flight;
Not seen at once, at once he’s lost to sight.
Yet short his flight, and should you mark him down,
The chances are that woodcock is your own;
But quick the hand, and no less quick the eye,
Would stop him as he hurries by;
Few are the birds, whate’er may be their sort,
More try the skill, give more exciting sport.

A few words may be said on the pheasants and partridges; and first of the former. The breed on the Ostler ground have a history. The late Sir Henry Dymoke, of Scrivelsby Court, used to rear, in large numbers, a white breed of pheasant, and as, with the exception of the Ostler ground, he, with his brother, had almost the whole of the shooting, extending from Scrivelsby to the Witham, they spread over that ground, and sought a kind of asylum in the dense cover of the Ostler plantations. Further, the writer’s father-in-law imported an Indian breed, called the “Kalege” pheasant, a very handsome bird; and these two strains have affected the breed on that ground, and, doubtless, have also had their effect on pheasants in the neighbourhood generally. White broods of pheasants are from time to time hatched on the ground; also piebald varieties are not uncommon. In the year 1898, a cream-coloured specimen was shot. Some of the cocks have at times a decided fringe of blue or purple in their plumages from the Kalege mixture.

As to partridges: It is only in recent years that the French, or red-legged breed (Cannabis rufa) have established themselves here. In the sixties, though said to have been introduced into England by Charles II., they were almost, if not entirely, unknown here. The writer shot them in Cambridgeshire in the fifties; and from the south-eastern coast and counties they have persistently spread, until now we have them everywhere. In the first instance, probably, they were brought across “the silver streak” by a gale, like the sand grouse, of which we have read, on the coast of Yorkshire. But whereas

the sand grouse were immediately shot as curiosities, the red-leg, being a bird (as every shooter knows) given to running, knew how to take care of himself, and, like many another unwelcome intruder, he came to stay. The flesh is decidedly inferior in flavour to that of the common English brown partridge. I well remember a practical joke being played on a Woodhall keeper. The “Frenchmen,” as they were called, had only just arrived. A party of us were out shooting, and a red-leg was shot. The keeper, seeing the new and handsome-looking bird, was very proud of it, and though he had never yet tasted one, he loudly proclaimed, in his ignorance, that it would be as good in the eating as fine in the plumage. A day or two after we were out shooting again. Luncheon time came, and we lay stretched on the sward under a spreading tree, on a hot day in September, where the ladies joined us, bringing the refreshment. Cold partridges were among the fare, and instructions had been given beforehand that the “Frenchman” should be specially reserved, to hand to the keeper. In due course the Captain passed on to the keeper—as being specially favoured “above his fellows,” by the attention—half of a partridge. Nothing was said, and we all busied ourselves with the viands before us, but the keeper was under our careful observation. Presently his features were seen to be considerably distorted by wry faces, as he turned the leg or the wing about in his hands, while picking them, with some difficulty, to the bone. Probably the bird was not only a “Frenchman,” but a tough old cock into the bargain. At length he could stand it no longer, and, looking round at us, he said, “Dal it! Captain, but this bird’s a rum ’un.” “Don’t you like it?” was the reply; “why, it’s the handsome Frenchman you admired so much, when it was shot the other day.” “Well, then,” said the keeper, “I wish all such Frenchmen were at the battle of Water-gruel. I’ll back the English.” [38]

There are some rather curious facts in connection with the brown English partridge and the French variety. Though different in their habits, and, it is said, even hostile to each other, they yet, in some instances, consort. I once shot on the moor three brown and one red-leg, out of the same covey, all young birds. They had evidently been reared together in one brood, and the old birds were of the brown species. Mentioning this to a friend of large experience, he told me that he had known several instances where the eggs of the two kinds had been found laid in the same nest. The eggs are, of course, easily distinguishable, those of the common partridge being of a greenish drab colour, while those of the red-leg are of a dull, cream colour, covered with small brown spots. I have been informed by another authority that the eggs of the red-leg have also been found in the nest of an outlying pheasant. [39] A curious provision of nature, conducing to the preservation of the species, may be here mentioned as interesting; the partridge, while sitting on her eggs, has no scent. On one occasion a man was consulting me about a tombstone at St. Andrew’s Church, Woodhall. We walked into the churchyard together, and stood conversing opposite the grave in question. I was aware that a partridge was sitting on her nest concealed in the grass between that grave and the next, and therefore would not approach very near. Suddenly I perceived that he had a terrier with him, which was very busily hunting over the churchyard. I begged him to keep it in. He was rather

indignant, and replied that it could do no harm in the churchyard. I remarked that he was not aware that within eight or ten feet of us a partridge was on her nest, and I did not wish her to be disturbed. He thereupon called in his dog, but that only brought his dog nearer to the nest, hunting the while; and the dog actually passed over the nest without scenting the bird. [40] The eggs were hatched the next day, and that doubtless accounted for her sitting so closely. Whether or not from an instinctive consciousness of this safeguard is not for me to say, but the partridge is rather given to selecting her nesting place near a highway or a footpath. I have known several instances of this, and only last year I repeatedly saw both the parent birds sitting on their nest together, on a bank close to a public footpath which was daily traversed.

To show how closely a partridge will continue to sit, under very trying circumstances, I give here an anecdote of what occurred in a parish adjoining Woodhall Spa, as it was related to me by the chief witness, the Squire himself.

In a meadow adjoining Roughton Hall, a partridge made her nest in a slight depression of the surface. The meadow was, in due course, mown, the mower passing his scythe over her without injuring her, and unaware of her presence, the depression having still enough grass to conceal the nest. The field was afterwards “tedded,” i.e., the grass was tossed about by a machine, which again passed over the nest, still leaving her unscathed and unmoved. In the process of “cocking,” the field was next horse-raked, the rake passing over the nest, with the same result. One of the haymakers, however, nearly trod on the nest; this drove the bird off, behind him, so that he did not observe it. But a friend was near at hand. The squire, seeing the bird fly away, went to the spot, found

the hidden nest, and counted in it the unusual number of 19 eggs (promise of a good partridge season, weather permitting). He at once removed to a distance all the hay lying near, to prevent her being disturbed again, and watched the result. Within a quarter of an hour the partridge quietly returned to her nest. Ten days later she successfully brought off a brood of seventeen, two bad eggs remaining in the nest. Of course, as the hatching time draws near, the mother, feeling the young lives under her, sits more persistently than at an earlier period; but surely this mother partridge exhibited a remarkable instance of fidelity to maternal instinct, after passing through no less than four trying ordeals.

Of wild pigeons we have three kinds: the common woodpigeon or ringdove, of which there are large flocks; the stockdoves, which go in pairs, and (as their name implies) build their nest on a solitary stump or tree, or occasionally in a rabbit hole. The turtledove, though common in the south of England, is a migratory bird, and in these parts not a constant visitor. A “wave” of them spread over the Midland counties in 1895, and since that they have been seen in smaller numbers. The late Mr. J. Cordeaux, F.R.G.S., M.B.O.U., one of our greatest authorities, says that its note is lower and more of a querulous murmur than that of the ringdove. In size it is not much larger than a missel thrush.

The first of these pigeons is the bird named the “Culver,” in old writings, as Spencer sings in romantic ditty:—

Like as the culver, on the bared bough,
Sits mourning for the absence of her mate,
And in her song breathes many a wistful vow
For his return, who seems to linger late,
So I, alone, now left disconsolate.
Mourn to myself the absence of my love,
And sitting here, all desolate,
Seek with my plaints to match that mournful dove.

Of woodpeckers we have on the moor and in Bracken Wood at times, three kinds: the common green species (picus viridis) which is generally plentiful; the lesser spotted (picus minor), not seen every year, but occasionally; and, still less frequently seen, the larger spotted (picus major). Of the former of these spotted kinds, seeing three together, I shot one a few years ago; and the keeper shot another for me more recently, for our Naturalists’ Museum at Lincoln.

Of the “birds of prey,” so called, the greatest part are extinct, or nearly so, too often from a mistaken belief in their destructiveness;

whereas they are really useful allies of the farmer, if not also of the sportsman. In the cause of the latter, they, for the most part destroy (if they destroy game at all) the weakly members, so conducing towards keeping up a vigorous breed, and for the farmer they destroy smaller vermin, the mice which, but for them, would multiply (as they have done in several places) until they become a plague. In the year 1890, a very large bird was reported as being seen about the woods near Woodhall, but I could not get a sight of it myself, nor could I get anyone else to give a description of it, except that it was very large. After a time it disappeared from Woodhall, and was reported as being seen for a time about Revesby, and on November 8th an eagle was shot by the son of a farmer residing at Tupholme Hall, in a wood at Southrey belonging to Mr. Vyner. It proved to be a male bird, in good condition, measuring 6ft. 7in. across the wings, and weighing 11lbs. I rode over to see it, but it had been sent to the taxidermist to be stuffed. It was a sea eagle (Haliactus albicilla). The kite (milvus ictinus) used to be common 40 years ago; its presence being notified by our hens cackling, and ducks quacking, as they called together their broods, when they espied it soaring at a considerable height above. If a reckless chick, or duckling, neglected to take the warning, and seek shelter beneath the mother’s wings, there was for a moment a rushing sound, a general confusion in the poultry yard, a half-smothered scream, and the kite flew away with a victim in its claws. [42]

I have seen this more than once myself. The kite is now quite extinct in this neighbourhood. The same may be said of the buzzard (buteo vulgaris). Although their food was chiefly mice and small birds; perhaps occasionally game, but not generally; since, though a very fine bird in appearance, they were not rapid enough on the wing to overtake the partridge in full flight; yet the keepers waged war against them “to the knife.” Many is the buzzard I have seen nailed up with the pole-cats and other vermin in the woods at Woodhall. But they are now seen no more, and a handsome and comparatively harmless ornament of our sylvan scenery is gone beyond recall.

The Hen-Harrier (circus cyaneus), a more active bird than the buzzard, is another of the “Ichabods.” Its last known nesting place was on the top of “The Tower on the Moor,” near Woodhall. As a boy, the writer has climbed that tower for the eggs, and he has now a very fine specimen of the old bird stuffed, measuring about 40 inches across, from tip to tip of the wings. These birds were wont to fly at higher game than the buzzard, and doubtless did at times destroy partridges; but they also fed largely on water-rats and frogs, and were not above gorging themselves on carrion. The female is larger than the male.

The beautiful little Merlin (Falco Æsalon) was also seen, though not common, twenty-five or thirty years ago. It was a very plucky little bird, and I have seen one strike down a partridge larger in bulk than itself. This is gone, never to return.

The Sparrow-Hawk (Accipiter fringillarius) survives, although in diminished numbers; and this indeed is the only one of the hawks against which “my voice should be for open war.” It is very destructive and very daring in the pursuit of its quarry. A connection of my own was sitting in a room facing the garden at the Victoria Hotel, Woodhall, when a sparrow-hawk dashed after its prey, broke the glass of the window, and fell stunned on the floor of the room. The female in this kind also is larger

than the mate. This bird will kill young ducks and chickens, and partridges, and even pheasants.

The Kestrel (Falco tinnunculus) also still survives, and we do not grudge it a prolonged lease of life. It feeds chiefly upon mice and small birds, cockchafers, and other insects; is a graceful object as it hangs lightly hovering at a considerable height in the air; with its keen vision detects its small prey half hidden in the grass or stubble, and then with lightning rapidity, drops like a stone upon it, and bears it away. I have kept kestrels and sparrow-hawks and tamed them; and the former will become tractable and almost affectionate, but the latter is a winged Ishmaelite, and very treacherous, and if allowed a little liberty, it generally ends in his making his escape. [44a]

Owls are still, I am glad to say, plentiful. They are amongst the farmers’ greatest feathered friends, killing enormous quantities of mice, which otherwise would damage his crops. [44b] We have three kinds on the moor or in the woods: 1st—the barn owl, or screech owl (stryx flammea); 2nd—the wood or brown owl (synnium aluco); 3rd—the horned-owl (asio otus). The two last are very much alike in both size and colour, but the last has two tufts of feathers rising on each aide of the head, from which it gets its name of horned-owl. I have a note among my shooting records: “Dec. 5th, 1872, shot Bird Hag Wood, in Kirkstead, put up about a dozen owls.” These would be the “horned” kind. Five were shot on that occasion, but as a rule they have been carefully spared, one only occasionally being killed as a specimen for stuffing. Within the nineties, being out with my gun, on the moor, when the

ground was covered with snow, I passed by a solitary thick Scotch fir, when an owl flew out. I wanted a specimen for a friend who was staying with me, and I shot it. The report created quite a commotion within the tree, and some twenty owls were immediately flying about me. Not being likely to settle in the snow, and apparently dazed by the glare of the sun reflected from the snow, I left them as quickly as I could, to recover their composure, and return to the sheltered quarters in which they had congregated. Hunting, as they do, almost entirely by night, they have little opportunity of interfering with the game, nor is it their propensity to do so. [45] There are three very ancient hollow oak trees in “The Arbours” Wood in Kirkstead. These are a favourite resort of the barn owl.

The carrion crow still nests on the moor, although the eggs are taken every season. But the old birds are very wary, and manage to keep out of shot. The common rook, however, of late years, has got a bad name, as having taken up the marauding habits of the genuine crow. Owing to the improved cultivation of land, there is not now the supply of grubs on which the rook used to feed, and they have taken to hunting for the eggs of partridge and pheasant, and may be seen “quartering” the ground as methodically as a pointer or setter. They are strongly suspected of killing the young as well as rifling the nests of eggs, and the Scotch keepers complain of their depredations on the moors, among the young grouse.

A writer in the “Yorkshire Poet” (of August 22, 1898) says that black game are decreasing in the Border counties, as the rooks destroy the eggs.

This completes the list of the larger birds frequenting the neighbourhood. As I write this chapter, a letter from an old friend says that he well remembers the number of night-jars

which were to be heard “churring” about Woodhall on a summer’s evening. This bird (caprimulgus Europœus), locally called fern-owl, comes to us about May. I have a note: “May 23rd, 1873, the first night-jar heard.” During the daytime, the visitor, walking quietly through the woodland paths near the Victoria Hotel, may, if he has a keen eye, see the night-jar lying flat upon the branch of an oak, hardly indeed perceptible, owing to its colour being so near that of the brown bark. Then, towards evening, it may be seen taking its short and wonderfully rapid flights, and you may hear its bills snap together as it catches the moths and cockchafers on which it feeds. It breeds on the moor, the nest generally being laid on the ground among the bracken; whence its name of fern-owl. The old idea of its sucking the goat or cow, from the former of which it gets its classical name caprimulgus (as well as the English equivalent), is, of course, long since exploded. [46a] The churring note is seldom heard except when it is at rest on a branch of a tree.

The brilliant little Kingfisher (Alcedo ispida), the most gay in colour of all our birds, may still sometimes be seen, darting about the only rivulet which we can boast of at Woodhall, and which rejoices in the unattractive name of “The Sewer,” [46b] although its water, welling up at its source near Well Syke Wood, is beautifully clear and pure. The occurrence, however, of the bird here is rare. An old inhabitant of Kirkby assures me that it is not uncommon on the river Bain, in that parish; and of late years, partly

through the writer’s influence, it may be seen on the rivers Bain or Waring, in the heart of Horncastle, unmolested, and even fed, by the people.

The Grey Fly Catcher (Muscicapa Grisola) is fairly common on our lawns, where it will sit quietly on a garden seat, or roller, and thence take its short jerky flight after the flies. I have known it to nest year after year, at the Vicarage, in a hole in the wall, where an iron ventilator was broken.

The Wryneck (Yunx Torquilla) is a somewhat uncommon bird at Woodhall, though a pretty one. For several years it also frequented the Vicarage garden, sometimes four or five of them, during the summer months. One year there were so many that I shot one and had it stuffed, and I found that at the same time a noble Marquis was having two stuffed, as being rather rare. It is called in some parts of the country the “weet” bird, from its peculiar note; other authorities say that the note is represented by the words, “Peel, peel,” or “Peep-peep.” I should myself say “Snipe, snipe” was nearer to the sound, and a writer compares it to the sound of Punch, in the old show of “Punch and Judy,” which I think comes nearer to my own interpretation. The body of this bird is in colour a mixture of grey and brown, but its tail and wings are most beautifully marked with dark zig-zag bars, which make it very handsome. In size it is between the blackbird and the lark. Like the woodpecker, it has a very long tongue, which is covered with a glutinous matter, and which it inserts into the grass roots or tree bark, in search of its food. [47]

I give here a list of birds which I have stuffed, all of which were killed in this neighbourhood:—Night-jar (Caprimulgus Europœus), wry

neck (Yunx Torquilla), buff blackbird (Turdus merula), razorbill (Alca Torda), little auk (Mergulus Alia), ruff (Machetes Pugnax), green sand piper (Totanus Octaopus), snipe (Scolopax gallinago), water rail (Rallus Aquaticus), golden plover (Charadrius Pluvialis), woodcock (Scolopax Rusticola), large spotted wood pecker (Dendrocopus Major), hawfinch (Coccothraustes Vulgaris), cuckoo (Cuculus Canorus), jay (Garrulus Glandarius), French partridge (Cannabis Rufa), turtledove (Turtur Auritus), horned owl (Asio Otus), hen harrier (Circus Cyaneus), kestrel (Falco Tinnunculus), peregrine falcon (Falco Peregrinus), piebald pheasant (phasianus colchicus), buff pheasant, cormorant (phylacrocorax carbo), jay (corvus glandarius), heron (ardea cinerea), horned owl (asio otus).

In times gone by, never to return, the numbers and variety of wild fowls frequenting the Witham, with its “sykes and meres,” was something extraordinary. Charles Kingsley doubtless wrote, if not of his own knowledge, yet, at furthest, at second hand, when he gave the following description: “Grand it was, while dark green alders and pale green reeds stretched for miles . . . where the coot clanked, and the bittern boomed, and the sedgebird, not content with its own sweet song, mocked the notes of all the birds around . . . far off upon the silver mere would rise a puff of smoke from a punt, invisible from its flatness. Then down the wind came the boom of the great stanchion-gun; and after that another sound, louder as it neared; a cry as of all the bells of Cambridge, and all the hounds of Cottesmore; and overhead rushed and whirled the skeins of terrified wildfowl, screaming, piping, clacking, croaking, filling the air with the hoarse rattle of their wings; while, clear above all, sounded the wild whistle of the curlew, and the trumpet note of the wild swan.” “Prose Idylls,” The Fens.

The living clouds on clouds arose,
Infinite wing! Till all the plume-dart air
And rude resounding shore was one wild cry.

Of the swans, we may observe that not only did this bird, in its wild state, frequent the Witham and the Fen waters, but the swannery was a valuable possession. The Abbots of Bardney and Kirkstead owned swanneries on the Witham. (“Archæol.” vol. xvi., p. 153). The swans of various owners were distinguished by marks on the upper mandible, and there were no less than 97 different swan marks on the Witham. A rhyming list of the birds of the Witham is given in Drayton’s Polyolbion (song

25), too long to quote here; suffice it to say that one parish alone, near Boston, some 60 years ago, sent 30,000 wild fowl in a year to London—(Thompson’s History, Boston). The bird’s captured by net were dunlins, knots, ruffs, reeves, red-shanks, lapwings, golden plovers, curlews, godwits, etc. One fowler stated that he had so taken 24 dozen lapwings in one day, and four dozen and nine at one time.—Stevenson’s “Birds of Norfolk,” vol. i., p. 57. Other birds shot by the fowlers were mallard, teal, widgeon, whimbrells, grebes of several kinds, and the “yelping” avocet. A relative of the present writer owned a decoy, where some 20,000 wild ducks were taken, within his own recollection, in one season. [49]

We now come to the last bird which I shall name in this somewhat lengthy list; a goddess among birds, as someone has almost literally called her, “œmula divini suavissima carminis ales”; and the old Scotch poet, William Drummond, of Hawthornden, says:—

Sweet artless songster! thou my mind dost raise
To airs of spheres—yes, and to angels’ lays.

while quaint old Isaac Walton says: “She breathes such sweet music from her little instrumental throat, that it might make mankind to think that miracles are not yet ceased.” The nightingale was first heard in my own garden, at the vicarage, Woodhall Spa, in the spring of 1876. Having heard it at Cambridge, in the South of England, and also in Italy, I immediately recognised the note, and at first was delighted at the arrival of this new visitor to Woodhall Spa, who did not come needing the water, and complaining of aches and pains, but

to delight everyone with its rich flood of song. And having thus found its way here, it has further found the attractions of Woodhall so great that, although favouring no other place in the neighbourhood, it has continued its annual visits ever since, and has brought its kindred in increasing numbers. But, although charmed at first with its melody, the novelty wore off; and when, night after night, there were three or four of these birds waking the echoes beneath my bedroom window, trying in jealous rivalry each to outdo the other in compassing the whole gamut, “in the rich mazes of sound,” my admiration considerably abated, and I became rather disposed to vote the performance a veritable surfeit of song, to the utter banishment of much-needed slumber. Before, however, I had arrived at this prosaic way of viewing the “Queen of Song,” I composed in its honour the following lines, with which I shall close this chapter on the Birds of Woodhall:—

TO THE NIGHTINGALE.
2 a.m., April 27.

How from that tiny throat,
Songster of night!
Flows such a wealth of note,
Full of delight;
Trembling with resonance,
Rapid and racy,
Sinking in soft cadence,
Gushing with ecstasy,
Dying away,
All in their turns;
Plaintive and gay,
Thrilling with tones aglow,
Melting in murmurs low,
Till one’s heart burns?

Once in the wilderness,
By desert well,
Hagar in loneliness,
With Ishmael,
Sighed to the silent air,
Tears on her glistening;
Yet to her, even there,
Angels were listening,
Noting her prayer.

Even so singest thou,
Not to thyself,
Mayn’t there be list’ning now
Some fairy elf,
Silently sitting near
Thy dark retreat,
Drinking with grateful ear
Thy music sweet,
Ringing so clear?

No! not alone art thou;
One there’s above, e’en now,
“Whose mercy’s over all,”
“Who sees the sparrow fall;”
“To Him the night is day,”
He hears thy matin lay,
High o’er us all.

Through the hushed, slumb’ring air,
Thy accents raise,
For all his loving care
Incense of praise;
Thrilling with happiness,
Full with content,
Still asking His goodness,
Prayer with praise blent.

Little thou mayest be,
Yet art His care;
He, too, has given thee
Gifts rich and rare.
Still, then, thy voice upraise,
Still chant thy Maker’s praise
While we are rapt in sleep,
Still thou thy vigil keep;
Still let some earthly cry
Go to our God on high;
Humbly, yet fervently, piercingly call,
Call for His watchfulness over us all.

CHAPTER V. DENIZENS OF THE WOODS, &c. QUADRUPEDS.

It is the inevitable, if regretful, duty of the recorder of the past to have to inscribe “Obiit” over the mention of many an individual who comes under his notice, and this applies to the four-footed animals, as well as to the birds and the wild flowers, of Woodhall. Of some of the most interesting, it must be said that they are gone, and their place knoweth them no more.

The first I may mention is the Badger. This animal used to be fairly common in these parts; whether it is now quite extinct is difficult to say, because its nocturnal habits, and very retiring disposition, prevent it coming much under the observation of man. It is supposed still to harbour in the rocks at Holbeck, some nine miles from Woodhall. A specimen was captured at Woodhall about the year 1885, frequenting some rabbit holes in a bank, at that time belonging to myself, and within 100 yards of the present blacksmith’s shop on the Stixwould-road. Another was captured a few years before in the adjoining parish of Martin, which I have stuffed. At an earlier date one was taken by a man named Thomas Norris, at Well Syke Wood, some two miles from Woodhall Spa.

About the year 1889 one was seen for some months in the Northern Dar Wood, in Woodhall. The keeper, doubtless with murderous intent, tried to find its burrow, but did not succeed. It was not killed so far as is known, but disappeared. Another was killed in June, 1898, at Mavis Enderby. In 1903, two badgers were killed at Asgarby, and one at Asterby in 1904. In 1899 our local pack of hounds, the South Wold, ran a badger, instead of a fox, over several fields, until he took to ground, and was afterwards killed by one of the party, as he kept his head out of the hole. It should hardly be a moot

point whether the extermination of the badger is an advantage or not, although a good deal has been written on both sides of the subject. Its skin makes the “sporran” of the kilted Highlander, and its hair makes our shaving brushes. Though it may be found occasionally in an enlarged rabbit burrow, it is not there to prey on the rabbit; for (as Major Fisher assures us in his interesting work, “Out-door Life in England,” 1896) its diet is mainly vegetarian, and what animal food it indulges in is mice, frogs, an occasional hedgehog, with beetles, snails, and worms; and especially it is very partial to the grubs of the wasp. It is very cleanly in its habits; sometimes occupying the same “earth” with the fox, to the great advantage of the latter, as it clears away the putrid matter brought in by Reynard, and so prevents his contracting the mange, to which he is very liable, from his own untidy propensities. [53a] Being thus not only comparatively harmless, but also serviceable to the sportsman, it is much to be regretted that continued war should be waged against these creatures. [53b] Unfortunately, old prejudices are but slowly overcome. By a statute enacted in the 8th year of Queen Elizabeth, chap. 15, and confirmed by subsequent statutes, provision was made for the destruction of what were then deemed “noysome foule and vermine,” and the price of 1s. was set on the head of every “fox and grey,” i.e., badger. This act continued in force down to 1863. But the old ideas concerning the badger have been long exploded among those who know anything of its habits. The badger, further, is the only representative of the bear family in this country. A scion of that race, whose bones are found in our fossiliferous caverns, co-eval with the mammoth and prehistoric man, he, if any of our existing animals, may boast of “blue blood in his veins.” The nobleman, whose ancestry came over with the conqueror, is a parvenu in comparison with him. Surely the principle of Noblesse oblige

alone should ensure for him a shelter in our woods and wastes. [54a]

The next to be mentioned of our ferœ næturæ, also the object of constant persecution, and growing, consequently, rarer every year, is the Otter. The parish of Thimbleby adjoins Woodhall Spa on the north, indeed, a large slice of it is now included in the recently created civil parish of Woodhall Spa. At the further end of Thimbleby an otter was killed in the year 1898, at a water mill on the river Bain, the miller erroneously supposing that it would kill his ducks. Shortly before, another specimen had been shot by a keeper on the same river, at Goulceby, its mate fortunately escaping. Soon after, a young specimen was seen several times disporting itself in the Horncastle Canal. It there escaped the vigilance of many would-be assassins, and gradually worked its way towards our neighbouring river, the Witham; but there it fell a victim to a gunner, who descried it in a drain near Tattershall Bridge, in Billinghay Fen. Another specimen was afterwards shot among the dykes of Walcot Dales, near the Witham, and still another in the neighbouring parish of Martin, a few years ago. Here again this persistent slaughter is much to be regretted. The otter is not the enemy to the fisherman which it is too commonly supposed to be. In the “Badminton Library,” the Honourable Geoffrey Hill says: “People are beginning to find that the otters kill and keep down the coarser fish, especially the eels, which live on the spawn and fry of the better sorts.” Mr. E. Daubney, writing from the banks of the Dart, says: “They eat frogs, rats, birds, fish, et id genus omne, but of nothing are they more fond than the eel; for this they will give up the finest and most fresh-run salmon.” [54b] In our own neighbourhood, in 1901, two young otters were shot on a farm at Sturton; they were at a pond which abounded in eels, and had doubtless by the eels been attracted from the river Bain, a mile distant, where they could only get trout.

A naturalist, who watched some otters at their home, night and day, for more than two months, says that he only saw them take three trout; the first fish taken was an eel, the second a chub, or roach. (“Country Life,” illustrated, Vol. VI., No. 134, July, 1899.) Another authority [55a] states that the stomach of one specimen examined “was full of larvæ and earthworms”; while a fourth writer [55b] says, “Otters will eat celery, potatoes, young shoots from the hedges; and especially have they a liking for the two first.” The writer has seen a dead salmon lying on a Highland river bank with the shoulder eaten away by the otter, their peculiar habit being to take only this part, and never to return to the body again. [55c] But even their attacks on the salmon have indirectly a useful effect, for, as one of the authorities already quoted (Mr. E. Daubney) observes: “If a salmon pool is visited by otters, the salmon are hustled, and so made to bestir themselves (often when sickly, and reluctant to move), and so make the effort to get down to the sea, to return again enormously increased in size and condition, and in this way the otter does the sportsman a service in sending the salmon down to recruit in the sea; just as, in turn, the sea-lice which fix upon the salmon when recruited in the salt water, so harass the fish, as to drive it once more up the river again into the fresh water, when it may afford sport to the angler.” [55d] It is not generally known, and it has even escaped the notice of our greatest naturalists, that the otter utters a shrill whistle when calling to its mate or young, which might be easily mistaken for the note of the kingfisher or sand-piper. This has been noticed by Mr. F. B. Whitlock, in the “Naturalist” for 1895, p. 381. The great stronghold of the otter is the broads of Norfolk, where, in the sluggish, reedy water, he can get

plenty of eels, snails, and so forth. In our own neighbourhood, if the war and extirpation goes on, he will soon be a memory only.

The next wild animal to be named as fairly common at Woodhall is the Fox. The locality, indeed, has been for many years a stronghold [56] of Reynard, as was to be expected, in a district where the woods are so extensive, although by no means so extensive as they were within the writer’s recollection. On one occasion, some 14 or 15 years ago, we had the Burton hounds, and the South Wold, over the same ground, in the same morning, within hearing, if not within sight, of each other. The Ostler Ground, especially from the thick and warm cover afforded by the heather, may be said to be a nursery for foxes for the supply of the neighbourhood. Not long ago there were six earths; and there are still three, which are carefully preserved; and the bark of the dog-fox or the answering scream of the vixen may be heard almost any night, in different directions, while out foraging. So thick is the cover, in parts, that the hounds frequently fail to penetrate it; and, after the pack have gone away without a find, I have almost trodden upon a fox, on one occasion upon a brace of them, still lying snugly among the “ling” in security. The fox does much less harm than is commonly supposed. It will not disturb other game if it can get rabbits, and it will not take rabbits if it can get rats. A very old sporting farmer has repeatedly assured me that although he had a rabbit warren near his farmstead, the rabbits were left undisturbed, and even his chickens were safe, so long as there were rats to be captured in his corn-stacks, or in the banks about his farm-buildings. [57]

The first fox which the writer ever saw, was brought by a Woodhall man, named Hare, to his father. It had been caught in a trap by the leg, and had attempted to bite its own foot off, in order to effect its escape. It was kept until the injured limb had recovered, and was then sent to his friend, the M.F.H. The writer’s own recollections of fox-hunting go back to the days of the famous Jack Musters, the Squire of Colwick and Annesley, who married Mary Chaworth, the object of Lord Byron’s passionate admiration. Sometime in the forties he hunted our own South Wold country. He was indeed “a character.” Though said by the Prince Regent to be “the most perfect gentleman he had ever met,” yet, in the hunting field, his language and his actions were most violent. The writer has still clearly impressed on his memory an occasion at Woodhall, when, as a boy of 12 years old, mounted on a small pony, and with the hounds running hard, he endeavoured to open a gate for the impatient M.F.H., and, on his not being able to accomplish this quickly enough, he was assailed with such a flood of invective, and torrent of oaths, that he was forced to withdraw from the attempt in confusion and bewilderment. But, if the sportsman who crossed his path was not spared by “Jack,” as he was familiarly called, neither was any unfortunate hound which offended him. On one occasion, a young hound, at High-hall Wood, near Woodhall, was guilty of chasing a hare. The whole “field” was in consequence pulled up; one of the whips was ordered to bring the delinquent forward. The thong of his hunting crop was twisted round the hound’s neck, and while he on foot held the poor brute in this way, the other whip dismounted and belaboured it with his whip until he was himself too exhausted to flog any more. The whole field were kept looking on at this display of wholesome (?) discipline, and when it was over the hound was left lying on the ground, almost strangled and a mass of contused weals, to recover its consciousness and limp after the departing pack, as best it could. The painful impression made upon the young mind of one devoted to animals, and tender of their feelings, remains still as an unpleasant memory, from which it recoils.

At one of our meets, a fox was found in Bracken Wood, which, after giving us a good run round the neighbourhood, eventually took refuge in a cottage near High-hall Wood. Entering by the open door, it mounted the ladder which formed the staircase to the one bedroom above; there it crept under the bed. The hounds hunted all round the premises, but the door having been shut by the occupier, an aged, retired keeper, and there being a strong wind which blew the scent from the door, his retreat was not discovered. He remained in this place of concealment until the hounds had gone to a safe distance, and then, descending by the ladder, bolted out of the door and made off, verifying the adage of Erasmus (older than “Hudibras”),

That same that runnith a awaie
Againe maie fighte ane other daie.

The well-known cunning of the fox is shewn in the following:—A favourite “find” for many yeans has been Thornton Wood, some three miles from Woodhall Spa; and a frequent line for the fox to take was (and is) from that covert to Holme Wood, near Scrivelsby. To accomplish this the Horncastle Canal and the small river Bain have to be crossed. The writer, as a boy, has swum the canal on his pony, at the tail of the pack; but usually riders have to make a detour by a bridge, between the first and second locks on the canal. During the intervals of ten minutes or a quarter of an hour required for this, the hounds are left to themselves. It happened on two or three occasions that in this interval the scent suddenly failed, and the fox was lost; casts were made up and down the river, but without success. On one occasion, a labourer, working in the grass field between the canal and the Bain, saw the fox cross the canal by the lock doors, over which there was a narrow plank-bridge for foot-passengers. It then made across the field for the Bain. He saw it pass out of sight down the banks of the river, close by a willow tree, overhanging the water; but it did not emerge on the other side. With the lack of quick wit, characteristic of the clod-hopper, it did not occur to him to mention this at the time. He told it, however, afterwards to his master, a hunting man; and, on a subsequent occasion, when the same incident occurred again, one of the whips dismounted and went into the water, and, poking about the roots of the willows, dislodged Reynard, concealed under the hollow bank, and immersed under water, except his nose and mouth, by which he was hanging

suspended from a fang of the tree roots. Surely Reynard’s clever ruse deserved a better fate than the death which speedily followed.

The following incident occurred under my own observation. I was out shooting in Woodhall. In a certain field I had put up a hare, which went away, without a shot. Passing, in due course, to the next field, I observed an object sitting, so far as I could make out, in a crouching position, in the middle of the field, and it looked in the distance like a man. I proceeded towards it, and soon perceived that it was a fox, sitting up on his hindquarters. At this moment a hare, presumably that which I had put up just before, entered the field and cantered leisurely in the direction of the fox. As sportsmen are aware, the hare, though able to see behind it, or on either side, does not, from the peculiar position of the eyes, see so well straight in front. In this case, the hare never perceived the fox until it was within a few feet of it; whereupon it stopped short, and the two sat up facing each other, evidently mutually fascinated, as the bird is said to be by the snake. They thus remained motionless, or powerless to move, for some minutes, until my nearer approach attracted their attention and broke the spell, whereupon they both bounded off in different directions. This, I am told by an authority, was a case of neurasthenia, or nerve-paralysis. A not quite similar occurrence was recorded some little time ago. A farmer saw a pheasant go to roost in a tree, standing alone in the field. Presently he saw a fox approach, go to the tree, and look up at the pheasant. After pausing for a moment, regarding the bird, he proceeded to run rapidly round the tree in a narrow circle. This he did for some time, continuing his circuit without intermission; when, to the farmer’s astonishment, the pheasant fell from its roost, and before it reached the ground was seized by the fox, who went off with his prey to a neighbouring plantation. This would seem to have been a case of hypnotism, rather than neurasthenia. The bird was mesmerised, or made giddy, by the fox’s circular motion, and literally fell into the operator’s arms.—(“Spectator,” January, 1898). The writer, when travelling in Germany, once met a German gentleman, who had visited country houses in England, and had conceived a great admiration for the English sport of fox-hunting. “Ah,” he said, “we have nothing like it in Germany. It is a grand institution. It makes you good horsemen, good soldiers, good judges of country and distance.” To those who

would object to fox-hunting on the score of its cruelty, I would quote words used at a church congress, by Colonel Hornby, master of the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. Speaking on “The Ethics of Amusements,” he said: “The exercise of hunting is productive of the most beneficial effects on both mind and body. There could be no hunting without suffering to the animal hunted, but this was greatly exaggerated. These animals were born to be hunted by other wild animals; we had destroyed the latter, and our hunting was more merciful. The pain inflicted was no equivalent to the pleasure afforded to hounds and horses, leaving men out of the question. The true lover of sport was a lover of mercy as well. Every sportsman, in the true sense of the word, did all in his power to lessen the suffering.”—Quoted, “Guardian,” Oct. 17, 1894, p. 1,620.

The days are gone by when gentlemen “of the cloth” were common in the hunting field. Yet I have known some of the hardest working clergymen, and the most sincere, earnest Christians, who saw no excessive cruelty in the chase. We have no “Jack Russels” among us now; the last of the type who lived in our neighbourhood found a dead fox in his pulpit, when he ascended it to preach his sermon one Sunday morning; and though he did not deliver a funeral oration over it, it was said that he buried it with as much loving reverence and genuine grief, as if it had been a Christian parishioner.

A meet of the foxhounds at that favourite tryst, the “Tower on the Moor,” near to Woodhall Spa, presents a pretty and lively scene. Besides the red-coated sportsman, there are riders, with horses of every degree, from the barebacked, or rudely saddled “screw,” to the 100 guinea or 200 guinea hunter; and from the “weedy” hack to the long, elastic-legged animal of racing blood. There are numerous vehicles, two-wheeled and four-wheeled, with their varied occupants, from the butcher’s light cart to the phaeton or the drag. There are numbers on foot, of both sexes; some of the men, staid of mein and beyond middle life, have already walked their miles; townsmen, for once, breaking away from their trade, or their business, and bent once more on breathing the fresh air on the heather, and listening again to the “echoing horn,” as it vibrates through the woods. There are ladies, on horseback, eager for the burst across country “in the first flight”; there are ladies on cycles, not yet arrived at the

degree of perfection to enable the fair riders to take a “bee-line,” but yet, from the speed attainable, able to make rapid detours, and if they study the wind, and are familiar with the “lay” of the country, likely to see almost as much of the sport as the best-mounted. All are bent on the healthy enjoyment of this thoroughly English pastime. Their thoughts might find echo in the old hunting song,

Tally-ho! Tally-ho!
Let the foreigner know
We are Englishmen: so,
Tally-ho! Tally-ho!

And who shall say that the pleasure is confined to them? Someone has said: “The horses enjoy it, the hounds enjoy it, and no one can say from experience that the fox does not enjoy it as well.” Then comes the M.F.H., with his beauties, all in “the pink” of condition. A moment’s delay for pleasant greetings between all and sundry, and the hounds are quickly thrown in for business; their tails, and little more, wave above the long ling and the tall bracken. The whips gallop to their points of observation. Presently a whimper or two is heard; then the deeper tone of an old hound takes it up; the rest rally about him, and soon the whole pack join in full chorus. A halloo is heard from a ride, as the fox crosses it; a distant hat is held up to show the line he is taking in the cover, and then a more distant shout of “gone away,” and the whole field are off, helter skelter, as though riding for their lives, sauve qui peut. Such are “the pleasures of the chase,” for which we are indebted to the Little Red Rover: “The sport of kings, the image of war, without its guilt.” (Somerville, “The Chase,” Book I.)

The neighbourhood of Woodhall combines lands of a wild unreclaimed nature, such as the Ostler Ground and other moorlands, in the parishes of Thornton, Martin, Roughton, Kirkby and Tattershall, and closely contiguous, and even mixed up with these, lands which are in an advanced state of cultivation. I have already mentioned a tract of waste, boggy ground, lying between the Tower on the Moor and Bracken Wood, formerly the haunt of wild fowl, and still called “The Bogs Neuk.” The origin of this ground was probably the following:—The old antiquary, Leland, writing of “The Tower,” [61] says, “one of the Cromwelles builded a pretty turret, caullid the Tower on the Moore, and

thereby he made a faire greate pond or lake, bricked about. The lake is commonly called the Synkker.” This “lake,” and all trace of it, have entirely disappeared; but it is probable that the decay of its “bricked” walls, or of whatever the environment may really have been, led to the escape of the water, and the creation of the tract of swamp, which remained until recent years. Similarly the Ostler Ground was, within the writer’s recollection, a much wilder tract, and its woods more extensive than at present. Some 300 acres of wood were destroyed by fire, through accident, about the year 1847. This happened at night, and, seen from a distance, it looked like a vast American prairie conflagration, the heavens being tinged with a lurid light far and wide. At that time the plantations opposite the Tower were of Scotch fir, so dense that the rays of the sun could scarcely penetrate. The roads, as I have previously stated, were little more than cart tracts, often shifting; and the whole tract was almost as little frequented, or disturbed, as if it had been in the heart of the Black Forest of Germany. In the centre of this wild were two or three fields belonging to another property, [62a] where roamed a herd of small, shaggy cattle, which, shut out as they were from the rest of the world, became almost wild; and when, on occasions, the foxhounds penetrated to their haunts, they frantically broke through all bounds, and for some days afterwards would be found scattered about the open country around. This tract of wood and moor has been for many years the prettiest bit of wild shooting anywhere in this neighbourhood for many miles round. There is not, at the present time, anything like the amount of game upon it which was to be found only a few years ago; drainage and several very dry seasons, as also two or three accidental fires, having killed much of the ling, and reduced very considerably the amount of cover. Still, to the genuine sportsman who thinks more of a varied bag than of the slaughter of numbers, it affords great attractions, and the writer has enjoyed many a happy day of healthy relaxation, with dog and gun, upon it. [62b] The

variety of birds now, or formerly, to be seen, have been described already. The ground game upon it now, apart from the fox, are the hares and rabbits; of these I shall speak more at length presently. If the Moor ground has afforded fair sport of a wild and varied character, the shooting in the adjoining domain of Kirkstead, in hares and partridges, has been also much superior to the rest of the neighbourhood, with the one exception of Tattershall, which has been nearly as good. On one occasion, being one of a party of five, the writer was stationed at the north-east corner of “The Arbours Wood,” in Kirkstead, to shoot the hares which passed that point, while the rest of the sportsmen walked the wood with the beaters. In the space of about one hour and a quarter, without moving from his position, he shot 56 hares. At one moment he had 16 hares lying dead before him; and he could have shot many more, but that, from the rapid firing, his gun barrels became, at times, so hot that he was afraid to load, and the hares were allowed to pass him, and escape unmolested. [63]

We occasionally find on the Ostler Ground an unusual hybrid between hare and rabbit, a notice of which may be of some interest to the naturalist. As its occurrence has led to a good deal of correspondence, I will give here a summary of the observations made upon it as they were stated by me at a meeting of the Lincolnshire Naturalists’ Union. Among other persons who made enquiry about it was Mr. Walter Heape, of Cambridge, who has made

the subject of hybrids a special study. He asked my reasons for supposing the animal to be such a cross. My reply was as follows:—

(1) The animal is the size of a hare.

(2) Its fur is the rabbit grey.

(3) The head is the shorter, and the ears the more pricked and shorter, of the rabbit.

(4) One which I shot at, and missed in the ling, bolted straight for a hole, as though accustomed to it, and I never knew a hare to go to ground in that ready way.

(5) A tradition has long attached to the Moor that the hare and rabbit do occasionally inter-breed.

Mr. Heape replied:—“I am aware that many naturalists deny that hares and rabbits will breed together. I am not, however, myself of that opinion, but I never had satisfactory proof of such a cross occurring.” Further enquiry led to the following facts:—In the year 1773 the Abbe Domenico Gagliari got two litters from a female hare by a male rabbit. Richard Thursfield also got hybrid’s of these two species. M. Roux, in 1847, established a breed of “Leporides” in Angonleme, where he bred largely hybrids of hares and rabbits, and these hybrids were fertile with both parent species and among themselves. Baron de Gleichen states that at Hoching, Canton de la Prusse, Polonaise, hybrids of hare (female), and rabbits (male) are generally known. He says, however, that M. Brocca, the French savant, states that there are anatomical differences between hare and rabbit which make it, antecedently, improbable that they should inter-breed. I have myself shot three of these hybrids on the Ostler Ground, and have one of them stuffed. In the year 1897 Sir Henry Hawley shot a similar specimen in Haltham Wood, some five miles from Woodhall; more recently (Oct. 4th, 1898), the Rev. C. E. Chapman, then rector of Scrivelsby, shot another in New York Fen; one was occasionally seen on the Ostler Ground in 1898, and one was mentioned in “Land and Water,” March 5, 1892, as having been shot on the Moors, at Parkend, in Northumberland. I may add that a cross between a rabbit and guinea pig is in the possession of a person at Horncastle; and I have lately heard of a cross between black game and the capercailzie in Scotland. But the following somewhat analogous cases have created special interest. Professor Ewart, of Edinburgh, has bred a cross between a male Berchell’s zebra and a mare pony, of the Isle of Rum breed, half wild, lent for the

experiment by Lord Arthur Cecil. The pony was jet black; the foal resulting, except over the hind quarters, had as many stripes as the zebra sire, the stripes being fawn colour, with background nearly black. In form it closely resembled a well-bred foal. As another interesting case of a similar kind, Lord Morton has bred a cross between a male quagga and a nearly pure-bred Arab mare; and Lord Tankerville has, more than once, bred a cross between the famous wild Chillingham bull (Bos Urus Primigenius) and a shorthorn cow.

An interesting variety of the hare is also found in Woodhall and the neighbourhood. This is the albino or white hare. Some 30 or more years ago one was frequently seen in the parishes of Langton and Woodhall, and eventually was shot in Thimbleby. They were then, so far as the writer knows, in abeyance for some years. But within the last decade heredity has asserted itself, and they have reappeared in increased numbers, and would doubtless become an established variety if allowed to multiply. In September, 1894, one of the Woodhall tenants killed, in the harvest field, a three-quarter-grown white leveret. In 1896 the writer presented to the Natural History Museum, at Lincoln, a fine albino specimen, also shot in Woodhall, with two small white leverets, accidentally killed in the harvest field at Langton. Since then, attention having been drawn to their existence, a number of instances occurring in the neighbourhood have been recorded. One was shot at Ranby as far back as Oct. 19, 1860; two were seen in Clayworth in 1896; one was shot in Baumber, Sept. 17, 1896; one shot at Thorpe Tilney, in Timberland parish, with slight tinge of brown on the ears, October, 1897; one shot in Timberland in 1895; one being seen still at large in Thorne Tilney in May, 1898; one shot in Branston, September, 1895, half grown; two shot at Bracebridge in 1893 or 1894; one shot in Wispington in 1896. [65] On one occasion, when

shooting in Kirkstead, the writer shot (right and left) a couple of hares with white face and forelegs, one of which he has stuffed.

We commonly speak of the cunning of the fox, but Mr. E. A. Pease, M.P., in his recent book, “Hunting Reminiscences” (Thacker & Co., 1895, p. 119), says: “The hare is really a much more rusé animal than the fox; can steal better away, and, once started, there is no end to her wiles and dodges.” Of this cunning, with a view to self-preservation, I can give instances. It has been maintained that hares never take to water, but a correspondence was carried on in the newspaper a few years ago (see “Morning Post,” Nov. 14, 1892), in which instances were given of their doing so. I have myself seen a hare, which has eluded the greyhounds, swim across a moat, almost surrounding the house in which I am writing; and then steal away to the cover of some large ferns in a sheltered nook in the garden. Some years ago a baronet visited a relative of mine in this neighborhood, and brought with him a pack of beagles. We used to run on foot after these in pursuit of hares. It is known that a hare, when getting exhausted, has not the strong scent of one just started. As we ran over a rough ploughed field, I have seen a hare, when nearly tired out, thrust another sitting hare out of her “form,” and take her place. The pack of beagles passed over the worn-out hare squatting in the furrow, and rushed forward with a fresh burst of music in their rich deep tones, on the strong scent of the hare just set on foot. I passed the squatting hare, but had not the heart to betray her, feeling that she deserved to reap the reward of her cleverness. When hunted by harriers, hares often “double” on their track, and so throw the hounds out. I here give a very clever instance of this, which I myself once witnessed. On one occasion, sitting on the South Downs, watching the movements of a pack of harriers in the distance, I saw “puss” gradually approaching me. In a hilly country like the Downs, a hare, from the great length and propelling power of her hind legs, gains considerably upon the pack in running up hill, and loses ground in a descent. The hare in question had just

descended a steep Down side, the hounds gaining rapidly upon her. It was what may be termed “a squeak” for her life, when, in the “dean” below, [67] she reached, just in time, the shelter of a clump of gorse. Working her way through this, she stole out on the opposite side to the pack, and at a tremendous pace faced the hill, near the top of which I was sitting, by a chalk quarry. In the ascent she distanced the hounds once more, but she was getting done, and, in the gentle breeze which floated towards me, I distinctly heard her panting as she bounded upward. But here her instinctive cunning came into play. The hill top was a few feet above me, some twenty yards away. I sat motionless, and, in her anxiety about her pursuers, she never observed me. She passed me, breathing heavily, and sprang along as far as the hill top; there, just at the brow, she paused, then cantered forward a few yards, returned, and repeated this more than once. Then, turning suddenly towards me, she made four or five huge bounds, only just touching the ground, and dropped into the chalk quarry a few feet below me, and crept under the shelter of some dwarf thorn bushes. Her object was manifest. By passing more than once over her own tracks, on the hill top, she created a strong scent, which the breeze, just catching it at the brow, would carry further forward. By her leaps towards the quarry, she had left but a slight scent, and under those thorn bushes she was doubtless waiting tremblingly the result of her ruse. I remained motionless, watching the issue. The pack came somewhat laboriously up the hill side, keeping close to the line she had taken; and a pretty sight it was, as a large sheet would almost have covered them, as they held on compactly together. They passed, as the hare had done, within a few yards of the chalk quarry; pressed on to the brow of the hill, and thence followed the scent which had been blown on beyond it. Presently there was a check, and the music ceased. The master never thought of “harking back,” his pack having followed a strong scent beyond the brow; but pushed on to a spinney lying on the slope of the next “dean.” I sat for a time longer by the quarry, and presently I saw puss, having recovered her breath, emerge from her hiding place and steal away, bent, doubtless, on reaching some distant secure retreat before her limbs became stiff from the unwonted exertion.

I have known a hare, when hard pressed by the harriers, enter a tunnel under a field gateway; but here instinct rather fails her; for, too often, it is only avoiding one mode of death by courting another. If there is water in the ditch, running through the tunnel, the obstruction caused by her body makes the water rise, and she is drowned; or, if she stays any time in the tunnel, her cramped limbs get so stiff after her exertions, that she cannot get out.

There is one kind of foe which the hare finds more difficult to shake off, or elude, than a pack of harriers or beagles. Stoats, foumarts, polecats, et id genus omne, are becoming scarcer every year; although the writer was recently told of a marten-cat—probably the Pine-marten (martes abietum)—being killed in a tree, and sold for 10s. as a rarity. I was a witness of the following:—Walking, in the small hours of the morning, in a parish contiguous to Woodhall, on my way to a stream where I was going to fish, I saw a hare in a field adjoining the road, which was leaping about in a most extraordinary fashion, starting hither and thither, plunging into the rushes, springing into the air, and performing all sorts of strange antics, which I could only account for, had she been “as mad as a March hare,” as the saying is; but this was in the month of May. Presently she rushed forward, occasionally leaping into the air, towards the fence which separated me from the fields. I expected to see her appear through the hedge, in front of me; but she did not come. Out of curiosity I got over the fence, when I saw the hare lying, a few yards further on, stretched out as though dead. I went up to her, and found that she was, indeed, quite dead; and fast on her neck was a weasel, so gorged with her blood, that its usually slender body was quite bloated. Following the proverbial national instinct, I killed the weasel; carried the hare to a footpath, and left it there, that some labourer passing by might take it home to regale his family.

This incident leads me to speak of the pertinacity of our weasels in hunting their prey, say a hare, as above, or a rabbit. On one occasion, as I was riding by the side of a strip of low whinbushes and long grass, a rabbit rushed out just in front of me, its fur apparently curled with perspiration, uttering a kind of suppressed cry, and evidently in a state of the greatest terror. I pulled up in order to discover the cause of this alarm. The rabbit re-entered the cover a few yards further on; but presently,

where it had emerged, I saw a weasel; and then I became aware that a number of these creatures were working through the grass. I watched their movements, following them at a distance, till they had about reached the spot where the rabbit re-entered. Then, feeling a keen sympathy for the poor persecuted rabbit, I charged into the midst of the pack, and by dint of plunging up and down among the startled company, and striking at them with my whip, I succeeded in dispersing them. At the same moment the rabbit, which had no doubt been crouching near, half paralysed with fear, darted out, and passing by me, went away at a great pace, as if rejoicing in the rescue. I pursued the weasels for some distance, and should say there was not less than a dozen. I was much astonished at the enormous leaps which they made in their flight, their long, lithe bodies contracting, and then expanding with a sudden jerk which threw them forward several feet at a time. As to the habit of weasels hunting in a pack, Waterton, the naturalist, mentions that he has seen two old stoats with five half-grown young ones hunting together. [69] Richard Jefferies, in his book, “Round about a Great Estate,” mentions having seen a pack of five stoats hunting in company, and says that a poacher told him that he had seen as many as fourteen so engaged. In the above case, which came under my own observation, the weasels were all apparently full grown and equally agile.

CHAPTER VI. REPTILES, FISHES, INSECTS.

Walking along the path through the wood, from the cross roads, near St. Andrew’s Church, towards the Victoria Hotel, the writer, on one occasion, observed a lady poking with her parasol at some object lying on the ground close to her feet. On coming to the spot he found that she was playing with an adder, which had crossed her path, apparently quite innocent of the danger she was incurring, the serpent still, evidently, having some attractive power for this, too curious daughter of Eve. He at once, by a blow on the head with his walking stick, despatched it, and then explained to her that it was lucky for her that it had not bitten her on the ankle. The adder or viper (Vipera Berus) is, fortunately, not common about Woodhall, but it exists there, and may be seen at times, basking on a sunny bank, or lying among the dead and dry foliage near a path, or on the open heath, where the unwary pedestrian is liable to tread upon it. It is the more dangerous because it is apt to vary in colour, according to the locality which it frequents, and therefore is the less easily observed. The colour is always some shade of brown, from a dull yellow to an olive tint; but it may be specially known by the zigzag, black markings along the back, and its broad head, with V-shaped mark in the centre. Its length is from a foot to a foot-and-a-half, although specimens have been killed as long as four feet. (“Naturalist,” 1895, p. 206.) The female is larger than the male. Its bite is made with great rapidity, so that there is little opportunity to escape it. The poison is very virulent, and we are told that in some cases it has proved fatal, but that was probably in the case of a naturally inflammatory subject. The writer has killed several at different times, on the Moor, near Woodhall. On one occasion, on a hot day in September, when a friend was shooting with him, the dog of the friend was bitten. It immediately howled, and seemed to be in considerable pain. He was in time to see the adder and to kill it. He then hurried off with the dog and caught a train to Horncastle, where a dose of

Eau de Luce was administered, and the dog recovered. Olive oil, also, well rubbed into the bitten part, is said to be an effective remedy, and is often more easily obtainable. Another variety of snake found here is what is commonly called the “slow worm” or “blind worm” (Anguis fragilis), which is generally seen in moist meadow ground. It is from 10 to 16 inches in length, and quite harmless. Strictly speaking, it is a lizard, not a snake. The only other kind is the common grass snake (coluber natrix). This is fairly common. The writer has seen three linked together, lying on a bank in Kirkby-lane, a favourite walk near Woodhall. If taken unawares, without time to escape, it will hiss and make a show of fight, but it is perfectly harmless and defenceless, and usually endeavours to escape as quickly as possible, and will bury itself in the long grass, the hedge bottom, or underground with marvellous rapidity. Like the late Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, the writer has more than once kept a tame snake of this species, and has even carried it about in his coat pocket, to the astonishment of urchins who have seen its head peeping out. In a state of nature they hybernate; but when kept in a room, a favourite resort in cold weather was among the ashes under a fire-grate. If a hot coal fell from the grate into the ashes, the snake would rush out hissing, but presently return to its warm retreat again. Held out by the tail, they will try to climb up their own body, and snap, as if to bite at one’s hand; but their only real mode of defence is to inflate the body with air to its utmost power of expansion, and then emit it again, charged with a strong odour, repulsive enough to drive most things from it. [71a] They are found in length from one foot and a half to three feet; and the writer has seen one killed, from which 32 unhatched eggs were taken, each egg about an inch long. The question of snakes swallowing their young, to shelter them from danger, though asserted by several authorities, I have never been able to prove or disprove, although I have often watched them. [71b]

The Lizard (Zoctoca vivipara) is found in sandy parts of the moor, and sunny banks, but is not very common. Many a time, as a boy, I have caught it, and found, immediately afterwards, nothing left in my hand but the tail, the rest of the creature darting away over the ground, as if none the worse; or, rather, as one might imagine, moving more freely when relieved of the incumbrance. This “casting” of the tail would seem, really, to be an interesting, self-protective effort. As the partridge shams lameness in its movements, to draw away an intruder from its young; or, conversely, as the Russian traveller, pursued by wolves, flings away his children, that he may escape himself; so the captured lizard, as a last resource, casts off its tail, and leaves it, wriggling, to attract the captor’s attention, while its own bodily “better half” seeks safety in concealment.

In the ponds at Woodhall the crested newt (Triton cristatus) and the smooth newt (Triton punctatus) were found by members of the Lincolnshire Naturalists’ Union, on their visit in August, 1893.

Of the fishes of our neighbourhood I have been furnished with the following list by the greatest local authority, who has inherited, and personally acquired, an intimate knowledge of the subject:—Trout (Salmo fario), river Bain; grayling (Thymallus vulgaris), Bain; pike (Esox lucius), canal, ponds, Witham; chub (Leuciscus cephalus), Bain; carp (Cyprinus carpio), ponds—rarely in Witham; rudd (Cyprinus Erythrophthalmus), Witham; bream (Abramis Brama), Witham; silver bream (Abramis Blicca), ponds; roach (Leuciscus rutilus), ponds, canals, Bain; dace (Leuciscus vulgaris), ponds, canal, Bain; blick (Alburnus lucidus), Witham; minnow (Leuciscus Phoxinus), Bain; tench, (Tinca vulgaris), ponds; perch (Perca fluviatilis), canal; loach (Nemachilus barbatulus), canal and river Waring; gudgeon (Gobio fluviatilis), canal, Bain, Waring, Witham; miller’s thumb (Gobio cottus), canal; stickleback or blue-eyed sailor (Gasterosteus aculeatus), Waring and ponds; lampern, or lamprey, or nine-eyed eel (Pteromyzon fluviatilis), Bain and Waring; burbot (Gadus lota), Witham; eel (Anguilla vulgaris), Witham, Bain, and ponds.

On some of these fishes I may here make a few remarks. The grayling, “Thymellus,” or “thyme scented” fish, is not indigenous, but has, of late years, been imported from the small river Eau, at Claythorpe, near Alford; and it is now breeding in the river Bain. It is also

called the “umber,” or “shadow” fish, because it does not lie near the surface, like the trout, but deeper down, and darts up at the fly, like a grey, dim shadow in the water. A recent angling author, referring to this habit of the fish, speaks of casting his fly “on the surface of a deep pool on the Doon, in which the shadowy form of the grayling could be seen three feet below. A fish would shoot up with a rush, seize the fly, and drop backward to the bottom.” (“Angling Holidays,” by C. W. Gedney, pp. 8, 9.) The special month for grayling fishing is August, and onward through the winter. The rudd, found in the Witham, is not unlike the roach, but a thicker fish, with sides and back almost of a green tinge. It has been taken up to 2½lb., but from 1 to 1½lb. is a commoner weight. It acquires its name from its red (ruddy-coloured) eyes. The blick is like the dace, but smaller and lighter in colour; very quick in taking the fly. Its average size is four to five inches. The stickleback, or “blue-eyed sailor,” is found almost everywhere—in pond and stream. It is remarkable for building a nest, almost like that of a bird, attached to the stem of a reed or some other aquatic plant, which the male fish defends with great pugnacity “against all comers.” It may be said to occupy a place among our fishes, analogous to that of the kingfisher among our birds, as being decked with brighter colours than any other kind; especially is this the case in time of excitement, as when defending the nest. It then darts about, with all its spines erect, and flashing with green and gold and red. Anyone who thrusts a stick into the water near the nest may witness this for himself. “Sticklebacks were formerly found in such large quantities in fen waters that they were made a source of considerable profit, being boiled down for the oil they contained, and the refuse sold as manure.” (Thompson’s “Boston,” p. 368.) The miller’s thumb is about the size of a gudgeon, to which it is allied, but has a head broader than its body, whence it gets its other name of “bull-head.” The burbot has something of the flavour of the eel. The lamprey gets its name of the “nine-eyed eel” from nine orifices along the side of the throat, through which the water passes from the gills. It is sometimes said to be poisonous, but the Germans eat them as a delicacy. Carp, of the “Lake” variety, were put into the Witham several years ago, and they are occasionally taken 10lb. or 12lb. in weight. The ordinary pond carp is no longer known near

Woodhall, but they survive in a pond, where the writer has caught them, at Wispington. They are a somewhat insipid fish, although at one time highly esteemed. There was an old saying that the “carp was food fit for an abbot, the barbel for a king.” Tench were found in great numbers in a pond which formerly existed on the site now occupied by “Oranienhof” Villa, within 150 yards of the Victoria Hotel. They have also been taken in the river Witham, but are now thought to be extinct. Very large tench were formerly abundant in a moat surrounding the house where the writer now lives. They are difficult to take with worm or paste, as, by continual sucking, they get the bait off the hook without being caught. The largest, sometimes weighing 3lb. or more, were taken in a wickerwork trap, of the shape of a dice-box, some 3ft. long, with the willow withes pointing inwards at each end. This was baited with a peony, or any gay-coloured flower; attracted by which, the tench found their way inwards, but could not get out. Every pond in Kirkstead has its fish; fish doubtless of ancient lineage, the descendants of those on which monks and abbotts once fattened. In an early blackletter edition of Chaucer, there is a fragment of a poem, called “The Pilgrym’s Tale,” which begins with these lines:—

In Lyncolneshyr, fast by the fene,
Ther stant an hows, and you yt ken.

Todd’s “Gower and Chaucer,” p. iv.

which might well apply to the “hows,” or monastery, of Kirkstead. Every such Religious House had its “fish stews,” or ponds, keeping, as Chaucer says, “Many a bream, and many a luce (pike) in stew, and many a fat partrich eke in mewe.” The Cistercian rules of diet were very severe, allowing only one meal a day, and none but the sickly were permitted to partake of animal food. Consequently, fish were in great demand, and the greater the variety, the more toothsome would be the monastic fare. [74]

Roach abound in the Witham, and attain a very fair size, not unfrequently up to 1¼lb.; and the artizans of Sheffield, and elsewhere, brought by special trains, in hundreds, often carry away with them very fair baskets. Bream of both kinds are very abundant in the Witham. I am told by one angler that he has seen the water crowded with shoals of them, and they are caught up to 6lb. in weight, and even more. I have before me the paper-cut shape of a bream caught near Tattershall, which weighed 5¼lb., was 21 inches in length, and about 20 inches in girth. Chub in the river Bain, between Horncastle and Roughton, and again between Tattershall and Dogdyke, are caught weighing several pounds. They are a wary fish, but, when hooked, fight hard for a while, and then suddenly collapse. The writer has often, in the early morning or late evening, sat by the river fishing for them with black slug, and seen two or three big fish, 1½ft. in length, slowly rising and sinking in the stream, as they examined the bait. A chub was taken in the Bain, in 1898, with the spoon-bait, weighing 4lb. 10oz. The Pike attains a good size in some of the ponds in the neighbourhood, and also in the river Witham. In a large pond, about three-quarters of a mile from the Bath-house, at an abandoned brickyard known as “Jordan’s Pond,” a near relative of the writer, a few years ago, landed a pike weighing between 13lbs. and 14lbs. It was currently reported for several years that there was a much larger pike in this pond, which those who had seen it estimated at 20lbs. weight. A resident near has told the writer that he has seen it, holding across its jaws a captured fish fully a foot long. This pike disappeared, it is believed in the night, in the year 1897. Doubtless the nocturnal marauder has kept his own counsel from that day to this. There is an old laconic expression, “Witham pike, none like,” which is only a condensed form of an older adage,

Ancholme eels, and Witham pike,
In all the world there’s none syke.

The pike of the Witham were evidently famed of yore, for Drayton, in his Polyolbion (Song XXV.), personifying the Witham, says:—

Thus to her proper song the burthen still she bare,
Yet for my dainty pikes I am beyond compare.

Walter de Gaunt (a.d. 1115) granted to the

Abbot of Bardney eight fisheries on the Witham, and a fishery on the Witham at Dogdyke (Dock-dike) was granted to the Abbot of Kirkstead by Philip de Kyme (a.d. 1162), which were privileges, in those times, of considerable value. (Reliquiœ galenœ, Introd., p. xxiii.). Records in the Archives of Lincoln state that when Henry VII. visited Lincoln, in 1486, keeping his Easter there, and “humbly and christenly did wesh the feet of 30 poore menne with his noble hands,” he was entertained at a banquet, to which the Mayor contributed “12 grete pykes, 12 grete tenches, and 12 salmons”; [76a] and on a second visit, after his victory at Stoke field, the Corporation presented him with “2 fatte oxen, 20 fatte muttons, 12 fatte capons, and 6 grete fatte pykes.” “Pike have been taken in the Fens,” says Mr. Skertchly, in his “Fenland” (p. 398), “from 20lbs. to 24lbs. The largest known was taken when Whittlesea Mere was drained. It weighed 100lbs., and was given to the late naturalist, Frank Buckland.” There are fine pike in the lake at Sturton Hall, where permission to fish may generally be obtained; and the present would seem to be an opportunity for placing on record that when, early in this century, the lake, of some eight acres in extent, was first formed by damming the stream which ran through the Park, it was stocked with pike and other fish from the moat which then enclosed the residence of the present writer, Langton Rectory. I find among my notes on Witham pike fishing, that in 1890 one angler [76b] took, in two hours, five fish, weighing altogether 31lbs.; the largest scaling over a stone (14lbs.), measured 35½ inches in length and 19 inches in girth. A few days later he landed fishes of 7lbs. and 5lbs., while another angler, about the same date, secured a pike of 16lbs. But a Horncastle fisherman, [76c] in the same week, captured one of 18lbs. in the Witham near Tattershall. One of our greatest anglers states that his largest pike, taken in the Witham, was 16¼lbs.; that he has landed 23 pike in one day, of all sizes, and 20 the next day, making 43 fish in two days. In the closing week of the season 1898–1899, a season below the average, a pike was taken in the Witham, near Tattershall, weighing 22lbs.

The late vicar of Tattershall, the Rev.

Mortimer Latham, to whose memory the writer would here pay his tribute of regard and respect for as genuine, and withal as genial, an angler as Isaac Walton himself, “knew,” as we might say, “by heart,” the Witham, its finny occupants, and their haunts; and many a fine fish he landed, the shapes of which he kept, cut out in brown paper, in his study. The largest pike he ever took weighed 19½lbs. I have before me, as I write, the paper-cut shape of this fish, lent to me by his daughter; who writes: “It may interest you to know that it was conveyed home in a bolster slip, and was on view in the vicarage courtyard, to the great entertainment of the whole village.” Its length was 38 inches, girth about 21 inches. She further adds: “My father, at one time, caught several tench (now supposed to be extinct in the Witham), and I am proud to say that the last one known to be captured was taken by myself, for being one of the keenest fishermen that even Lincolnshire ever produced, he made us as ardent fisherfolk as himself.” I have also the shape of a perch caught by him, weighing 2½lbs., length 15½ins., girth about 12ins.

No fish is so “coy and hard to please” as the pike. Of them may be said, what someone has said of women,

If they will, they will,
You may depend on’t;
And if they won’t, they won’t;
And there’s an end on’t.

The proverbial “variabile semper” element is their characteristic feature, a living illustration of a line, pregnant with meaning, of Coleridge,

Naught may endure but mutability.

On one occasion, a well-known angler tells me, he fished three long hours in a gale of wind, which nearly carried him into the river, without stirring a fin, and then, an unaccountable change of mood coming over the “water wolves,” through the next hour and a half they “took like mad,” and he landed 42½lb. weight. At the time two Sheffield men were fishing close by, who had been at the work for three days, and had landed only a few bream or roach, and one small jack. Under their very noses he landed three splendid pike, while they looked on thunderstruck. Such are the fortunes of war with fishermen. On another occasion, when the day was dull and calm, and there was nothing, one would have thought, to stir the fish to any animation, he landed at the same spot one pike of 16¼lb., and three of 9lb. odd each. “In fact,” he says, “pike are unaccountable.” In December,

1898, a boy caught a pike of 16lb. weight in the Horncastle Canal, at Tattershall, 3½ feet in length and 9 inches in girth; and another of 11lbs. was taken in the Witham, shortly after; and other cases of 14lb., and so on, are recorded. Pike, as is well known, are exceedingly voracious, and not very particular as to what they eat. A writer in the “Naturalist” [78] states that a pair of Shoveller ducks nested in a disused brickpit, and brought off their young; but a pike in the pit gradually carried them off, one by one, taking one when it was large enough to fly. The same fish destroyed nearly the whole of another brood of ducks, hatched at the same pit. The present writer has himself witnessed a similar occurrence. He at one time kept (as he does still) wild ducks, which nested on the banks of the moat surrounding the house. There were large pike in the moat, and he has frequently heard a duck give a quack of alarm, has seen a curl on the water, and on counting his ducklings, found that there was one less. And if pike are not particular as to their diet—all being grist that comes to the mill—neither are they particular as to the bait, if they are in the humour.

The writer, in a day’s fishing for trout, in a Scotch river, the Teviot, where he took perhaps a score or two in the day, would vary the sport on coming to a deep pool by taking off his flies, putting on stout gimp tackle, with a single large hook, which was run through the body of a small trout, or parr; and would often, in this way, land a good pike or two. Sometimes when drawing in the pike too hastily, it would disgorge the bait and hook, but on his making another cast, and letting them float down the pool again, the pike would return to the charge, unwarned by experience, and be eventually captured. On one occasion, rowing leisurely in a boat on Loch Vennachar, with his rod over the stern, and line trailing behind him, a trout, of a pound weight or so, took the fly, and hooked itself. This was immediately seized by a good-sized pike, and after a hard fight he secured both with gut tackle. Dining with the Marchioness who owned the above river, he was regaled on a 10lb. or 12lb. pike, which the Lady Cecil had caught that day, her boat being pushed along the river by a gillie, himself walking in the water, and she fishing with a single large hook, baited with a piece of red cloth.

We have quoted the lines celebrating the pike of the Witham, and the eels of the Ancholme

(also a Lincolnshire river), but eels were, at one time, abundant also in the Witham. Large tubs containing hundreds of them used to be taken to Horncastle on market days, or were hawked about to the country houses. It is said that as many as 16,000 eels have been taken in one year. If you bought eels from these hawkers, they were brought to your kitchen door alive, and, being difficult creatures to handle, your cook generally got the seller to skin them alive, and they were often put into the pan for stewing before they had ceased wriggling. Hence the phrase to “get accustomed to a thing; as eels do to skinning.” But an eel can only be once skinned in its life, and even the skin, stript from its writhing body, was supposed to possess a “virtue.” If tied round a leg or an arm, it was considered a remedy, or preventive, for rheumatism; and your cook would sometimes preserve the skin for a rheumatic friend. In these days the eels brought to market are few, and not half the size they used to be. Eels, from 2ft. to 3ft. long, and as thick as one’s wrist, were formerly quite common. Eels are supposed to migrate to the sea, and, in the year 1903, a large eel was found, early in the morning, about 100 yards from a large pond, in the parish of Wispington, travelling across a grass field, towards a stream, by which it might eventually reach the sea.

The only other fish which I have to remark upon is the trout. They are not found in the Witham; but the Bain trout are handsome; both the golden, or rich yellow kind, with pink spots, and the purple or mauve-coloured variety, but the former are much finer in flavour. For some years the swans on the Horncastle Canal made great havoc among the young trout and spawn [79a] in the neighbouring river Bain, but the last swan died in 1897. Further, there is now an artificial breeding tank established at Horncastle, managed by Mr. Rushton, for keeping up the supply. Some very fine fish have been taken at different times. My notes record as follows:—In April, 1896, one of the anglers already referred to [79b] caught a trout in the Bain, close to Horncastle, weighing 4lb. 6oz., 23in. in length. The same fisherman, in July, 1888, took another, within half a mile of the same place, weighing 4lb. 10oz., 23in. in length. The son [79c] of a quondam veteran angler,

and himself one of our keenest fishermen, tells me that he, several years ago, assisted his father to land a male trout of 7lb. weight, from the watermill pool at Horncastle. It fought so hard that he and his brother had to rush into the water and take it in their arms, their father’s tackle not being intended for such a monster. [80a] This, however, was surpassed by a trout taken by the late Mr. Robert Clitherow, of Horncastle, a beau ideal disciple of the gentle craft, which weighed 8lbs.

Probably the handsomest trout in the neighbourhood, though not the largest, are those of the Somersby “beck,” “The Brook,” rendered for ever classical by the sweet poem of the late Poet Laureate. In years gone by the writer has enjoyed many a picnic on its banks, when we used to pull off our shoes and stockings, and turn up our trousers—gentlemen as well as boys—to catch the trout by the process called “tickling” them, while hiding in their holes; which the ladies afterwards cooked on a fire extemporised on the bank. The music of the rippling stream haunts one still, as one reads those liquid lines of the poet, themselves almost a runnel:

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles;
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles. [80b]

Twenty-five or thirty years ago, the dykes in the Fens, near the Witham, abounded in fish of the coarser kinds, with some goodly pike among them. As a boy the writer has caught many a pike by the process called “sniggling,” i.e., a noose of wire, or gimp, attached to the end of a stiff rod, or stick, which is deftly slipt over a fish’s head, as he basks among the water weeds, and, when thus snared, he is jerked ashore. When shooting in the Fens he has also killed, at one shot, five or six fish crowded together in a dyke. But climatic alterations, and over-perfect drainage, have changed all this. The water now runs out to sea so rapidly that the

Fen drains are dry for a great part of the year, and the fish are no more.

Enough has now been said to show that the visitor to Woodhall Spa, who has a taste for “the contemplative man’s recreation,” [81] may find some employment in its vicinity. Most of the ponds can be fished on asking the farmers’ permission. As to the Witham, although there are angling clubs at Boston and Lincoln, the river is practically open to every one, in the season. It may be added that close to Tattershall station there is a large “ballast pond” containing good pike, and a letter to the shooting tenant, or to Lord Fortescue’s agent, would probably obtain permission to fish. At Revesby there is a reservoir, the source of the water supply of Boston, a large piece of water, which abounds in fish of various kinds. Bream, both of the silver and the carp kinds, are plentiful, running up to 4lb. in weight. Very large eels are taken there. Roach are of a fair size. Rudd are numerous; as also are perch, but small. Gudgeons are plentiful, serving for bait. Pike are abundant. In one case three were taken by the same rod within twenty minutes, one of them weighing 13lb. Another rod took two of 16lb. and 10lb., and it is commonly said that there is one occasionally seen “as long as a rail.” Permission may be obtained to fish here from the agent of the Hon. Mrs. Stanhope, Revesby Abbey. There is good accommodation at the Red Lion Hotel.

As, in the next chapter, I am to enter upon a different branch of my subject, passing roughly speaking, from the organic to inorganic—from the living to the dead—I will here give a few particulars, recently received, which may interest the entomologist. In the month of August, 1898, I conducted the members of our county Naturalists’ Union from Woodhall Spa

to Tumby, through a varied tract of country. The following is a list of the Lepidoptera which were found by one of the members:—

Two other members collected the following:—

NEUOPTERA

Sympetrum sp.

HYMENOPTERA

DIPTERA

COLEOPTERA

HEMIPTERA-HETEROPTERA

(in Fulsby Wood).

(In Tumby Wood.)

Those marked * are new to Lincolnshire.

SPIDERS.

CHAPTER VII. GEOLOGICAL NOTES.

In a county like Lincolnshire, mainly agricultural, in which the operations of man are, for the most part, confined to the earth’s crust, in ploughing and sowing, and, as some one has said, in “tickling” the earth’s surface into fertility,—in such a county we are not led ordinarily to explore the inner bowels of the world; as is necessary in mining districts such as certain parts of Yorkshire, Durham, Cornwall and elsewhere. Yet, with regard to our knowledge of its geological features, Woodhall may be said to compare favourably with a large majority of places. With one exception [84a] it is the spot, par excellence, in this part of the kingdom, where the earth’s hidden resources have been tapped, and tapped to considerable purpose, in the unique commodity for which it is famed—its mineral water. The book of Nature, so often “sealed,” has here been opened and its contents indexed. We have in the strata of the Woodhall well sundry chapters in the earth’s past history unfolded, at least to the initiated. The writer is not going to attempt here a systematic disquisition on a subject so abstruse (for which, indeed, he is not qualified), beyond touching upon some of its more salient, or more interesting features. The geological records of the Woodhall well have already been given [84b] in the very concise form in which they have been preserved for us. Whether they are to be entirely depended upon is questionable,

but we may here repeat them:—Gravel and boulder clay, 10 feet; Kimeridge and Oxford clays, 350; Kellaways rock, blue clays, cornbrash, limestone, great oolite, clay and limestone, upper Estuarine clay, 140; Lincolnshire oolite, and Northampton sand, 140; lias, upper, middle, and lower, 380 feet; total, 1,120 feet. The mineral spring is said to have issued from a stratum of spongy rock lying at a depth of 540ft. [85a] This would probably be in or near the ferruginous Northampton sand, the lowest layer of the oolite, and lying immediately above the upper lias. [85b]

In the year 1897 a boring was commenced within 500 yards of the original well by the artesian engineers, Messrs. Isler and Co., on behalf of the Rev. J. O. Stephens, on the west side of the Stixwould road, with a view to obtaining a second supply of the Woodhall water; this was carried to a depth of 700 feet. The engineers furnished me with a register of the strata so far pierced by the bore, but, as they are not described in the technical terms of geology, it is rather difficult to compare them with those of the old well. At a depth of 490 feet, sandstone with iron pyrites was pierced; this would probably be the ferruginous Northampton sand of the Oolite. It is at a less depth than the same stratum at the Spa well; but that was to be expected, as geologists state that all the geological strata “dip” eastward, and this bore being to the west, the stratum would naturally tilt upward. This born was ultimately abandoned. According to the records of the Spa well, derived from Dr. Snaith, of Horncastle, who knew the well from its birth, the saline spring was found at 540ft.; but Dr. Granville, who visited Woodhall, and wrote his

version, in 1841, puts it at 510ft. It is difficult to say which of these two doctors, who differ, should be accepted as the more trustworthy; and in 1841 Dr. Granville would still certainly be able to find plenty of persons familiar with the well and its details. But in the ferruginous sand, or near it, the spring was to be expected; and there it would seem Messrs. Isler, in the new boring, found saline water, though only in small quantity. The depth, according to their computation, was, as we have said 490ft., which is 20ft. above the Spa spring’s level, according to Granville’s version, and 60ft. above the depth given by Snaith. The paucity of the supply of the saline water in the Isler boring may probably be accounted for thus: The trend of the current found in making the Spa well was said to be from south-east to north-west, whereas this new bore is very nearly due west from the Spa well. If, therefore, the stream is of narrow width, this later boring is scarcely in the position to catch more than the side soakage of the current, and it would seem that the main stream can only be tapped either by another boring further north, or by a lateral shaft from the present bore running northward till it encounters the current. There remains, of course, the further and open question as to whether the saline stream formerly passing through the Spa shaft, still continues its former north-westerly course, after having the outlet afforded by that shaft. Would it not be more in accordance with the law of nature that the stream should take the course of least resistance by rising in the well, and not flowing further along the bed of its special original stratum? If that be so, the only chance of another well would be to bore south-eastward of the Spa; and probably the shaft sunk by the late Mr. Blyton beside Coalpit Wood, if it had been continued, would have proved a safer venture than any other as yet attempted. At some future time we may have the wolf disturbing the stream, above the lamb represented by the original well, to the detriment of the latter. It may be here noticed that in the Scarle boring, as we are told, there was found a strong spring in the upper part of the lower Keuper sandstone at the depth of 790ft., and a still stronger spring at the base of that formation at 950ft. In that case, therefore, as also at Woodhall, the water was found in sandstone, but at a much greater depth, and also in sandstone of a different character, viz., the Keuper at Scarle, the Northampton at Woodhall. Another difference is that in the

Scarle strata we pass at once from the surface drift to the lower Lias; the Kimeridge clay and all the Oolite formations, which are found at Woodhall, with a thickness of some 630ft., being entirely absent. These differences, of course, illustrate the fact that, owing to abrasion and other causes, not only do the strata underlying the surface drift vary in different localities, but their several thicknesses vary; while, as at Harrogate, the mineral properties of the water also vary at a distance of only a few yards. Pass beyond the limits of the particular stream, and, below ground as well as above it, you are not “in the swim.”

In the spring of 1904, Mr. R. A. Came, of the Royal Hotel, commenced sinking a shaft, in search of the Spa water, at a point some ¾ mile south of the original well; and early in 1905 water was struck at a depth of 492 feet, which proved to have the same saline properties, with the addition of Epsom salt, a good supply issuing from the spongy sandstone. This opens up a vista of great possibilities in the future; it does away with the monopoly hitherto existing, and may have a most important effect, in the further development of the Spa. The well is 7ft. in diameter, is bricked to a depth of 495ft., and sunk to 520ft. The boring was carried out by Mr. Joseph Aldridge, of Measham, near Atherstone, Warwickshire, an expert mining engineer. Many fine fossils, as ammonites, belemnites, and bi-valves, were found in the different strata that were pierced.

I now proceed to remark upon some of the geological strata, as found at Woodhall. And first, after the mere surface gravel, we have the Boulder clay. This has a very interesting history. In the “Life of Nansen,” the Arctic traveller, it is stated [87a] that the geological strata of the Arctic regions show that at some remote period the climatic conditions were the reverse of those which prevail now. Throughout those regions, at present of intense cold, there was quite a southern climate, in which walnut trees, magnolias, vines, etc., flourished; while, on the other hand, there was also a period during which our own country, and large parts of the Continent, lying in the same latitude, were buried under vast ice-fields with an Esquimaux climate. It is there further stated [87b] that boulders are

found scattered over Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which have been transported thither on glaciers, from regions still further north. In like manner glaciers at one time also spread over what are now Scotland and a great part of England, bringing along with them boulders from Norway, and Scandinavia generally. The present condition of Greenland, with its vast glaciers, pouring through its valleys, down to the water’s edge, on the sea shore, illustrates the condition of our own country at that remote period. [88a] As regards this country, these ice-streams may be classed under two distinct heads, (a) the native, inland glaciers, and (b) the north-eastern, Scandinavian glacier. To speak first of the former. As the climate, from causes into which we cannot here enter, [88b] gradually became coldier, glaciers were formed among the rugged hills in the present lake country of Cumberland and Westmoreland, some of which pushed their way westward, literally inch by inch, until they debouched in the Irish Sea, and filled it to overflowing, for it is only shallow. From Borrowdale, Buttermere, Eskdale, and other head centres, they also streamed southward and eastward. There was an immense central stream, which forced its way over the wild tract of Stainmoor (named doubtless from the thousands of boulders with which it is strewn); then, fed by lateral branches from many directions, it traversed Teesdale, turned towards the coast, passing by Scarborough, and so on to Holderness and the Humber, a branch also filling up Airedale and the Vale of York. [88c] From Holderness it passed the Humber, into Lincolnshire. Its most eastern limb would doubtless have debouched in the North Sea, and filled it; but here the north-eastern glacier, to which I have alluded, came into collision. Taking its rise in Scandinavia, it had spread into a vast sheet

in parts 3,000ft. thick, [89a] filled up the shallow North Sea, and the Baltic, a veritable mer de glace, and over-run northern Germany, its thickness even at Berlin being supposed to have been 1,300ft. Impinging on our eastern coast of Scotland and of northern England, it spread over a great part of Holderness, meeting and blending with the inland native glacier on the Humber; and the vast united ice-stream thence pursued its onward southern course, enfolding everything in its icy embrace, to the Thames and to the Severn. [89b] These great ice-streams created the geological formation called “The Drift,” or boulder-clay, which we have at Woodhall. The clay is simply the detritus, produced by the grinding, through long ages, of the rocks under the vast and weighty ice-fields slowly moving over them, and the abrasion of the hill-sides which they scraped in their course. The boulders are detached fragments, which fell from various rocky heights overhanging the ice-stream, rested on the surface of the ice-sheet, were borne along by it through hundreds of miles, and when, in the course of ages untold, the climate became milder, and the glaciers gradually shrunk and eventually disappeared, these fragments, often bearing the marks of ice-scraping, and oftener rounded by ice-action, fell to the soil beneath, and remain to this day, to bear their silent witness to the course once taken by the giant ice-stream. The period through which this process was going on has been variously computed, from 18,000 years, according to the estimate of Major-General A. W. Drayson, F.R.A.S., who gives elaborate astronomical statistics in support of his views (Trans. Victoria Institute, No. 104, p. 260), to 160,000, as calculated by Mr. James Croll (“Climate and Time”). It is now generally held that there were more than one ice-age, with inter-glacial breaks. These boulders are abundant in our neighbourhood, and of all sizes.

They may be measured by inches or by yards. There is a good-sized one in the vicarage garden at Woodhall Spa, which the present writer had carted from Kirkby-lane, a distance of a mile and a half. There is a larger one lying on the moor, near the south-east corner of the Ostler Ground. The writer has one in his own garden, a large one, more than 6ft. in length by 3½ft. high, and 2½ft. thick. It took five horses to drag it from its position, a quarter of a mile distant. There are six visible in the parish of Langton, two or three large ones near Old Woodhall Church; several large ones in Thimbleby, Edlington, and elsewhere. Smaller ones are often to be seen placed at turns in the roads to prevent drivers running their vehicles into the bank, or used as foundations to old cottages or farm buildings; and still smaller specimens may be constantly picked up by the pedestrian, or the sportsman, in his rambles through the fields. Much interest has of late years been taken in these boulders, arising from the distinct classes of glaciers to which I have referred, and the consequent difference between the nature of the boulders, as well as the source from which they have come, according as they belong to the one class or the other; and our Lincolnshire Naturalists’ Union have now a special “boulder committee” engaged in the investigation of this subject.

The late Professor Sedgewick, of Cambridge (whose lectures the writer attended), was the first to notice that along the Holderness shore there were (as he says) “an incredible number of blocks of granite, gneiss, greenstone, mica, etc., etc., resembling specimens derived from various parts of Scandinavia.” [90] These, we now know, were dropped by the great Scandinavian glacier; and, along with the kinds of stone here named, there are also boulders of Rhombporphyry (the “Rhomben porphyry” of Norwegian geologists, from the neighbourhood of Christiana), Augite syenite, and several more, not of British origin. These boulders are now being searched for, and found in our own neighbourhood. On the other hand, there is the different class of boulders which were brought down by the native inland glaciers. These consist largely of igneous kinds. The rugged hills of the Lake district owe their origin to fire; and the boulders which the glaciers have transported correspond. The shap granite, for instance, which is probably one of the commonest of this

class, comes from the shap granite bed of Wastdale, in Cumberland. Boulders of this rock, as Mr. Kendall tells us, “passed over Stainmoor in tens of thousands,” [91a] to visit us in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Other kinds are Felspar porphyry from Eskdale, in Cumberland, Andesite from Borrowdale, Granophyr from Ennerdale and Buttermere, Quartz, Basalt, and several more from the crystalline formations in the Lake district. Several boulders of these rocks have also been found in our own neighbourhood; and doubtless more remain to reward the explorer. [91b] I have dwelt at some length on this particular formation—the boulder clay—because it is the most ready to hand; it lies on the surface, in many parts around us, within the ken of the ordinary visitor to Woodhall Spa. It may give an additional interest to his rambles in search of health, to know that he may, at any moment, pick up a boulder which has travelled further, and passed through more strange vicissitudes, than he can well have done himself; perhaps, with Shakespeare, to read “Sermons in Stones,” and to moralise on the brevity of human life, with all its ailments, compared with those ages untold, through which the pebble in his hand slowly [91c] travelled on its long, laborious journey, to rest at length as a constituent element of the locality, where he himself is seeking relief and recreation.

To the west of Woodhall Spa, beyond the Stixwould-road, near the vicarage, and northward, the surface sand, in some parts, at the depth of a foot, or slightly more, hardens into an ironstone, so compact that tree roots cannot penetrate it. In root-pruning or manuring apple-trees, I have found the tap-root stunted

into a large round knob, further downward growth being prevented by this indurated formation. This oxide of iron also pervades the sandy soil, in parts, to a depth of four or five feet, impregnating the water with ferruginous properties, so that it “ferrs” bottles, or vessels, in which it is allowed to stand for any length of time. In consequence, the water frequently has a dull appearance, although the iron may probably make it a wholesome tonic.

The surface sand, which is of a still lighter character on the moor ground in Woodhall, and in Martin, Roughton, and Kirkby, contiguous to Woodhall, is what is technically called the “Old Blown Sand,” borne by the winds from the whilom salt marshflats of the Witham, when it was much wider than at present, and a tidal arm of the sea. It is comparatively a recent formation, yet abounding in fine particles, or pebbles, of quartz, and other elements of far earlier date; the larger of these are often rounded by tidal action. Below this surface sand we find, in many parts, a blue clay of varying depth. In a pit called Jordan’s pond, in an abandoned brickyard on the east of the road to Stixwould, it is at least 16ft. thick; also, in a large pit in Kirkstead, near Hogwood, some half-mile south-east of the Abbey Inn, which was dug to procure this clay, for “claying” the light super-soil, otherwise almost barren, it is many feet thick. Ammonites and other fossils are plentiful in it, often cemented together with veins of gypsum. Both these pits are mentioned in the Government Geological Survey (pp. 152, 153) of “The country around Lincoln.” Close by the latter pit the writer once found a curious fossil, which was for some time a puzzle to all who saw it. It is now in the British Museum, and was pronounced to be an Echinus crashed into an Ammonite.

The Kimeridge clay, named as the next stratum in the bore of the Woodhall well, crops up first about Halstead Hall in Stixwould, and continues through Woodhall to Horncastle, and so on to Wragby and Market Rasen. It abounds in fossils. Mr. Skertchly [92] found in the first of the pits just named, that this clay was divided into three layers, the upper being a line of Septaria (or nodules) full of serpulæ one foot in depth, then soft dark-blue clay, 6ft.; and below that another course of Septaria; and

Professor J. R. Blake records from this pit the following fossils[93a]:—Belemnites nitidus, Ammonites serratus, Rissoa mosensis, Avicula ædiligensis, Cyprina cyreneformis, Ostrea deltoides, Lima ædilignensis, Thracia depressa, Arca, Serpula tetragona. In other pits in the neighbourhood several other fossils have been found. [93b] [For a list of fossils found about Woodhall see Appendix II.] A peculiarity of this stratum is that the upper part of it contains bands of “inflammable shales,” being blue, laminated, bituminous clays, which burn readily. It was the presence of these which has tempted explorers to throw away their money in search of coal; as in the case at Donington on-Bain, where Mr. Bogg drove a bore to the depth of 309ft., but only found clay and thin bands of inflammable schist. [93c] In the case of Woodhall Spa, the money thrown away on one purpose has brought health and wealth to others, from a source then undreamt of in man’s philosophy. We cannot leave the Kimeridge clay without noting that its presence at Woodhall, in the position where it is, as the first geological formation below the surface drift, opens to us a vista—reveals to us a yawning hiatus—which embraces a vast expanse of time.

In the normal order of geological strata, the whole series of cretaceous formations have to be passed through before reaching the Oolite formation, of which the Kimeridge clay forms almost the upper layer. But at Woodhall and the surrounding district the whole of this series of rocks and soils is wanting. Their absence is eloquent, and tells a tale of widespread destruction. Standing near the Tower on the Moor we can see in the distance, stretching from north-west to south east, the range of hills called the “Wolds,” which, with a “cap” of marls, or sandy and flinty loams, are composed almost entirely of chalk; from them, near Cawkwell Hill (the hill par excellence of chalk), comes the water supply of Horncastle and Woodhall. They extend for a length of some 45 miles, with a width of some six miles to eight. The actual depth of the chalk is not exactly known, but a boring made through it, near Hull, reached the

Oolite beneath at 530ft. We may perhaps, therefore, put the average at 500ft. [94a] Doubtless, at one period, this cretaceous formation extended over the whole tract of country, but southward and westward from the foot of the present wolds it has since been swept away. And this must have taken place before the glacial period, because the glacial boulder clay lies upon the Kimeridge clay, which normally underlies the chalk. Mr. Jukes Brown (“Geological Journal,” No. 162, p. 117) says: “The Boulder clay is bedded against the slope of the chalk, shewing that this escarpment had retired to its present position in pre-glacial times.” By what precise process this was effected must be left to our savants to decide; but the remarkable fact remains, that a solid stratum, or rather series of allied strata, from 500ft. to 1,000ft. in thickness, has, by one process or another, been wiped out of existence, over the large area now coated by the Kimeridge clay. Through ages of enormous length the chalk was forming as the bed of a sea; a deposit consisting of inconceivable myriads of beautiful minute shells, mainly of the foraminifera, which can be detected by the microscope; and its destruction probably occupied as long a period as its formation.

Mr. Jukes Brown, whom I have just quoted, says: “The Wold hills must have been, in some way, exposed to a severe and long-continued detrition, when erosive agencies were very active.” Active, indeed, they must have been, to efface from an area so extensive a solid formation from 500ft. to 1,000ft. in thickness. And this boulder clay, as Mr. Jukes Brown further observes, has forced its way up the sides of the chalk, in places, to a height varying from 300ft. to 400ft.

The Oxford clay, which lies next below the Kimeridge, is a deep sea deposit, dark blue, with brown nodular stones; some of the fossils found in it are Nucula Ornata, Ammonites Plicatilis, A. Rotundus, Cucullæa, Gryphæa Dilatata, Leda Phillipsii, Annelida Tetragona, and A. Tricarinata, Avicula inequivalvis. [94b]

Kellaway’s rock, which lies just below, so called from a village in Wiltshire, near Chippenham, is a mixture of yellowish and buff sands, with brown and buff sandstone. The

chief fossils are Gryphæa Dilatata, and G. bilobata, Belemnites in abundance, and Avicula Braam-buriensis. [95a]

The Cornbrash, which succeeds (so called also from a district in Wiltshire, favourable to corn), is a light grey, fine-grained limestone, often so hard as to need blasting. It abounds in fossils. Among them are Avicula Echinata, Ostræa Sowerbyi, Clypeus Ptotii, Ammonites Macrocephalus, A. Herveyi, Nucula Variabilis, Astarte Minima, Trigonia (of four kinds), Modiola (of four kinds), Myacites (five kinds), Cypricardia, Corbicella Bathonica, Pholadomya (two kinds), Cardium (three kinds), Pecten (six kinds), and several more. [95b]

The great Oolite (so named from the Greek Oon, an egg, referring to the number of small stones, like fish-ova, found in it) is divided into Oolite clays and O. limestone. The clays are mottled green and bluish, with bands of ironstone, and concretions of lime. They indicate a shallow sea, as contrasted with the Oxford clay. Fossils are not numerous, but Rhinconella Concinna, Gervillia Crassicosta, Modiola Ungulata, Ostræa Gregaria, O. Sowerbvi, O. Subrugulosa, Perna Quardrata, Trigonia Flecta, and Palate of Fish are found. [95c] These beds correspond to the so-called Forest Marble of the South of England.

The Oolite limestone beds consist of white soft limestones, having at intervals bands of marly clay. This formation burns well, and makes good lime. Its chief fossils are Serpula, Rhynconella, Terebratula, and T. Intermedia, Avicula Echinata, Corbicella, Lima Rigida, Lucina, Modiola Imbricata, Myacites Calceiformis, Mytilus Furcatus, Ostræa Sowerbyi, Pecten Vagans, Pteroperna plana, Trigonia, T. costata, T. flecta, T. striata, T. undulata. [95d]

The Estuarine deposit, underlying the great Oolite limestone, is composed of light blue, green, and purple clays, intersected by soft bands of sandstone, and having at its base a band of nodular ironstone. It is not very fossiliferous, but the following are found:—Rhynconella Concinna, Modiola Imbricata, Ostræa Sowerbyi, Monodonta. [95e] The sandstone bands contain plant-markings in considerable numbers. As its name implies, this formation

was produced as the bed of an estuary or tidal river.

The next lower formation is the Lincolnshire limestone. This enters largely into the making of what is called “the Cliff,” which is the high land running south from Lincoln (visible from Woodhall) to the west of the Witham Valley and the Fens. It is a hard building stone, though once the muddy bed of a sea. It is sub-divided into the Hibaldstow and Kirton beds, so called because these strata are exposed in those parishes. Dipping to the east, it underlies the Fens and other upper strata to be found in the Woodhall well. It abounds in fossils, there being as many as 340 species classified, [96a] and consists, indeed, very largely of the hard parts of shells and corals compressed into a solid mass. To a Lincolnshire person, it is sufficient to say of this stone that our grand Cathedral is mainly built of it. We can only give here a few of the more frequent species of fossils:—Three kinds of Echinus, Coral (Thecosmilia gregarea), Serpula socialis, Lima (five kinds), Ostræa flabelloides, Pecten (two kinds), Hinnites abjectus, Astarte elegans, Cardium Buckmani, Ceromya Bajociana, Cyprina Loweana, Homomya Crassiuscula, Isocardia, Cordata, Rhynconella (four kinds); among the bivalves are Avicula Inequivalvis, and A Munsteri, Lima (three kinds), Lucina Bellona, Modiola Gibbosa, Mytilus Imbricatus, Pholadomya (two kinds), Trigonia costata; of univalves, Natica (two kinds), Nerinea Cingenda; of fishes, Strophodus (two kinds). [96b] This is a most useful stone for building purposes. The so-called “Lincoln stone” is largely used in our churches; whilst the “Ancaster quarries,” which also belong to this formation, are famous. The commissioners appointed in 1839 to report on the building stones of England, for the new houses of Parliament, stated that “many buildings constructed of material similar to the Oolite of Ancaster, such as Newark and Grantham churches, have scarcely yielded to the effects of atmospheric influences.” (“Old Lincolnshire,” vol. i., p. 23.) The well-known Colly-Weston slates are the lowest stratum of this rock. The fine old Roman “Newport Arch,” which for some 700 years has “braved the battle and the breeze,” a pretty good test of its durability, is built of this stone.

The base on which this lowest Oolite lies is the Northampton Sands, an irony stratum of red ferruginous sand and sandstone, the upper portion of it also being called the Lower Estuarine deposit. It is from this stratum so many springs arise in various parts of the county, as already mentioned, and among them the Woodhall well water. Its fresh water conditions show it to have been the bed of a great river, but a tidal river, as among the fossils which it contains some are marine shells. In this formation is found the iron-stone, which is worked at Lincoln. Its commoner fossils are Lima duplicata, L. Dustonensis, Hinnites abjectus, Astarte elegans, Cardium Buckmani, Modiola Gibbosa, Ammonites Murchisoniæ, Belemnites Acutus. Its ferruginous layers are (as given by Capt. Macdakin), [97a] Peroxide bed, clay ironstone, hard carbonate of iron, hard blue carbonate peroxidised band, blue ferruginous sand, ironstone nodules, bed of coprolites with iron pyrites.

And this brings us to the Lias formation, in which lies the lower part, amounting to rather more than a third, of the Woodhall wells. It is divided into the upper Lias of clay and shale; the middle Lias of Marlstone rock bed, clay, and ironstone; and the lower Lias of clays, ironstone clays, limestones. [97b] This formation, with a thickness of from 900 to 1,000 feet, runs across England from Yorkshire and Lincolnshire down to the coast of Dorset. The upper Lias of the Woodhall wells also helps to form the slope from 100 feet to 150 feet in thickness of the escarpment called “the Cliff,” to the west of the Witham Fens, and to the north of Lincoln, by Fillingham, and so on. Lincoln itself stands on Lias beds, with a capping of the lower Oolite limestone. [97c] It contains many Belemnites, Lucina, Ammonites Bifrons, A. Serpentinus, A. Communis, A. Heterophillus, Nucula Hammeri, Pleuromyæ, [97d] and especially the Leda Ovum,

which distinguishes it from other strata. The middle Lias, which underlies the upper, contains Ammonites Spinatus, A. Margaritatus (in great abundance), Rhinconella, Icthyosauri, Plesiosauri, and fossil wood, etc. [98a] The lower Lias contains Ammonites Capricornus, with many pyrites, A. Ibex, A. Jamesoni, A. Armatus, A. Oxynotus, A. Obtusus, A. Semicostatus, A. Bucklandi, A. Angulatus, A. Planorbis, Gryphœa incurva very abundant, and fossils of many other kinds. [98b] This brings us to the base of the Woodhall Spa wells. For a full list of the fossils so far found at Woodhall, the reader is referred to Appendix II. at the and of this volume.

These strata are shewn in the diagram given at the head of this chapter.

In giving the history of the well in Chapter I., the writer did not state the properties of the Woodhall water; but as these depend upon the geological elements, from which it originates, this seems to be the proper place to state them. The official analysis made by Professor Frankland, F.R.S., 1875, is as follows:—[98c]

The water contains unusually large proportions of Iodine and Bromine.—E. Frankland.

The remarkable features of this analysis are the quantities of iodine and bromine. Professor Frankland, for the Geological Survey, found, of iodine, 6.1 grains in 10 gallons of the water; bromine, 44 grains in ditto.

As compared with the water of Cheltenham, of Leamington, and of the famed German Spa at Kreuznach, we have the original analysis of Mr. West, of Leeds, giving:—

The Woodhall water, therefore, has five times the amount of iodine, and nearly twice the amount of bromine, of the strongest known Continental water. [99a]

I mentioned, in Chapter I., that the Dead Sea, in Palestine, was stronger in bromine than Woodhall. According to M. Marchand’s analysis, it contains bromide of magnesium 74 times the amount at Kreuznach, or about 30 times the strength of Woodhall; but the other great ingredient of the Woodhall water, iodine, is absent from the Dead Sea. [99b] In iodine the only known water surpassing Woodhall Spa is the spring of Challes in Savoy, [99c] which contains 1.045 parts per 100,000 of water.

I may add that at Old Woodhall, about four miles distant from “The Spa,” at a depth of 33 feet, in sinking a well, some 20 years ago, salt water was tapped, resembling in taste that of the Woodhall Spa well, but it gradually became less salt, and finally was replaced by a supply of fresh water. [99d]

There is one other geological feature of the neighbourhood of Woodhall, which has not yet been touched upon, viz., the Fens bordering on the Witham. These are said to have been, to some extent, drained by the Romans; [99e] but

within the last few centuries they have been partially reclaimed, have relapsed into bog and morass, and been finally reclaimed for good, in quite recent times. The writer, when a boy, used to visit a large farmer, living in Blankney Fen, whose father built the house in which he resided. Before building, an artificial foundation had to be made, by transporting soil in boats, or carts, from terra firma beyond the Fens, the whole Fen tract being more or less bog and swamp. When this had become sufficiently consolidated, the house and farm buildings were erected upon it; and from that centre roads were constructed, drains made, and the work of reclamation gradually extended. These drains, or “skirths,” as they are sometimes called, were periodically cleaned by a “bab,” a kind of dredge, with hooks at its under side to tear up plant roots. Great flocks of geese were kept, which were plucked alive several times a year, for the sale of the feathers, to make the famed Lincolnshire feather beds, and quills for the pens, now rarely seen, although, 50 years ago, in universal use. Until the land had become systematically reclaimed, it still continued to be extensively flooded in the winter months, and all cattle had to be housed, or penned, during that time, on the artificially raised ground. It frequently happened that early frosts caught the farmer napping, with his cattle still afield; in which case they had to be driven home over the ice, and numbers were at times “screeved,” i.e., “split up,” in the process, and had to be slaughtered. The fen soil is a mass of decayed vegetation, chiefly moss, interlarded with silt, deposited by the sea, which formerly made its oozy way as far as Lincoln. Large trees of bog oak and other kinds are found in the soil. These, it is supposed, became rotted at their base by the accumulating peat; and the strong south-west winds, prevailing then as they do now, broke them off, and they are, in consequence, generally found with their heads lying in a north-easterly direction. Borings at different places show the fen soil to vary in depth from 24ft. at Boston to 14½ft. at Martindale; but, as it has been gradually dried by drainage, it has considerably shrunk in thickness, and buried trees, which only a few years ago were beyond the reach of plough or spade, are now not uncommonly caught by the ploughshare.

The river Witham, which the visitor to Woodhall Spa sees skirting the railway, has passed through more than one metamorphosis.

Now confined by banks, which have been alternately renewed and broken down at different periods, before the drainage of the Fens, it spread over all that level tract of country, meandering by its many islands and through its oozy channels and meres, the resort of countless flocks of wild fowl and fish ad infinitum, but preserving still one main navigable artery, by which vessels of considerable tonnage could slowly sail to Lincoln. Acts were passed, in the reigns of Edward the Third. Richard the Second, Henry the Seventh, Queen Elizabeth, and the two Charleses; and Commissioners were again and again appointed to effect the embanking and draining of these watery wastes, but with only temporary success; and it was not till 1787, or 1788, that the present complete system of drainage was commenced, which is now permanently established. [101a] And in these days, the Fens, once consisting as much of water as of land, at times even suffer from a scarcity of that commodity; drains, which within the writer’s own recollection abounded with fish, being now often dry almost all the year round. At a much more remote period the Witham was probably a much stronger river, and largely conduced to altering the features of the county. This subject has been carefully investigated by our geologists, [101b] with the result that certain changes in the strata of the upper Witham valley, from its source near Grantham, and changes also in the lower valley of the Trent, go far to prove that the Trent, instead of, as it does now, flowing into the Humber, took a more easterly course, and joining forces with the Witham some miles above Lincoln, the united streams pushed their way through the gorge, or “break” in the cliff formation, which occurs there, and is technically known as “The Lincoln Gap,” and continued their course to the sea by

something like the present channel of the Witham. The idea of this “Lincoln Gap,” though the term is not actually used, would seem to have originated with Mr. W. Bedford, who stated, in a paper already mentioned, read before “The Lincolnshire Topographical Society,” in 1841, that “the great breach below Lincoln could only be accounted for by the mighty force of agitated waters dashing against the rocks, through long ages”. (Printed by W. and B. Brookes, Lincoln, 1843, p. 24, &c.) The theory would seem to be now generally accepted. Thus: “that ancient river, the river” Witham, honoured, we believe, by the Druid as his sacred stream, [102] consecrated in a later age to the Christian, by the number of religious houses erected on its shores, through a yet earlier stage of its existence performed the laborious task of carving out the vale of Grantham, and so adding to the varied beauty of our county; then, by a kind of metempsychosis of the river spirit, it was absorbed in the body of the larger Trent; the two, like “John Anderson, my Joe,” and his contented spouse, “climbed the hill together,” to the Lincoln Gap, and hand in hand wended their seaward way, to help each other, perchance, in giving birth to the Fenland; or, according to another theory, in making its bed. Through a long era this union lasted; but, as the old saying is, “the course of true love never did run smooth”; a change geologic came over the scene, and, through force of circumstance, the

two, so long wedded together, broke the connubial bond, and henceforth separated, pursuing each their different ways; the one, the Trent, the river of thirty fountains, betaking herself “to fresh woods and pastures new,” after brief dalliance with the Ouse, became bosomed in the ample embrace of the Humber; the other, the humbler stream of the two, retaining its previous course, pursued the even tenor of its way through the flats of the Fenland, with their “crass air and rotten harrs,” to find its consolation in the “dimpling smiles,” but restless bosom, of the shallow “Boston Deeps.” During the period of that ancient alliance of these two streams the tract of country between Lincoln and Boston, or rather between the points now occupied by those places, would be scoured by a greatly-augmented volume of water, and this may possibly account in some degree for the shallowness of “The Wash,” and the number of submarine sandbanks which lie off the mouth of the present Witham. Had the union of the two streams continued to the present time, bringing down their united body of silt, Boston would either never have come into existence at all, or would have been much further from the sea than it is.

The precise period at which this riverine union prevailed would seem to be still an open question; and we may say, with Horace, adhuc sub judice lis est; for, whereas Professor Archibald Geikie, Director-General of the Government Geological Survey, [103a] gives his opinion that “the gravels which have been laid down by an older Trent, that flowed through the gorge in the Jurassie escarpment at Lincoln, were later than the glacial deposits”; on the other hand, Mr. F. M. Burton, F.L.S., F.G.S., [103b] who has a thorough local knowledge of the county and its geological features, says there is sufficient evidence “to convince any reasonable mind that the present course of the Trent is not its original one; but that ages ago, in early pre-glacial times, I think, it passed through the Lincoln Gap to the fenland beyond, which was then open bay.” We may well say with Pope: “Who shall decide when doctors disagree?” [103c] This,

however, is too large a subject for a chapter on the geology of Woodhall Spa; but this brief reference to it may serve to show the visitor, who has the taste and inclination for such pursuits, that there are still subjects for interesting investigation in our neighbourhood, on which he might well employ his capacities for research.

CHAPTER VIII. THE ARCHÆOLOGY OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD.

In entering on this portion of our Records we are passing from the Natural to the Artificial, from the operations of the Creator to the works of the creature. A systematic process of enquiry would shew that, as in geology, so here, the subject-matter lies in layers. We have the prehistoric period concerning palæolithic and neolithic man; then follow the British, the Roman, the Saxon, the Danish, and the Norman strata, or eras; so many have been the elements which have contributed to the moulding of our country and our people, as we find them at the present day. But again, as in geology, so here, we find few traces in our own immediate neighbourhood of the earlier links in this series—the people who preceded the historic Britons. On Twig Moor, near Brigg, in the north of the county, a tract of ground very similar to our own Moor, many flint implements have been found. On an excursion of our “Naturalists’ Union” to that tract, one of the party found “a handful” of stone “knives and finely-chipped arrow heads.” [105a] The members of the same Society, visiting Woodhall in 1893, found on the Moor “patches of pale-coloured sand, slightly ferruginous, and having a considerable number of flints,” but none were found which could be said to shew traces of human use. This, however, is no reason why the visitor to Woodhall should not search for them. That they exist in our neighbourhood has been proved, since a good specimen of flint axe was found a few years ago by Mr. A. W. Daft, on Highrigge farm, near Stobourne Wood, in Woodhall. It is about five inches in length and 1¼ inches broad, and, from its high degree of polish, probably was the work of neolithic man. [105b] Another, smaller, flint celt

was found in 1895 by Mr. Crooks, of Woodhall Spa, in the parish of Horsington, near Lady-hole bridge, between Stixwould and Tupholme. Its length was 3½ inches, by 2½ inches in breadth, thickness about ¾ inch. More recently one was found in a field on the Stixwould road by his son, about three inches in length and 1½ inches broad, thickness ¾ inch. In 1904 several finely chipt flint arrow heads, about one inch in length and breadth, were found in the parish of Salmonby, near Horncastle, in a field called “Warlow Camp,” doubtless the site of a prehistoric settlement. The present writer has picked up at odd times some half dozen specimens, bearing more or less trace of human manipulation, but none of them so well finished as those referred to. A farmer residing near the Moor, to whom I recently explained what a flint implement was, said he had noticed several stones of that kind, but did not know that they were worth picking up. Two molar teeth of the Elephas primigenius, or extinct mammoth, have been found in a pit at Kirkby-on-Bain, situated between the road and the canal, about a quarter of a mile north-west of the church; [106a] and bones of Bos primigenius and Cervus elaphus were found among gravel and ice-scraped pebbles in a pit, near Langworth bridge (not far from Bardney). The former of these, the gigantic Ox, or Urus, belonged to the palæolithic age, [106b] when the first race of human beings peopled this land, but was extinct in the neolithic period in this country (though in a later age re-introduced). The latter, which is our red-deer, survived in a wild state, in our county and neighbourhood, until comparatively modern times. Large vertebræ, apparently of some huge Saurian, have been found, which the writer has seen, in West Ashby; and a large mammoth tooth is preserved among the treasures of the late Mechanics’ Institute at Horncastle, having been found in the neighbourhood. These are all the pre-historic relics which I can find recorded in our neighbourhood.

Later antiquities, of the British, Roman, and succeeding periods, are, or have been, fairly plentiful; the misfortune being that, as we, as yet, have no County Museum wherein they could be preserved, they have doubtless many of them been lost, or, if kept in private hands, are unrecorded.

When the bed of the Witham, by order of the Royal Commissioners, was cleansed in 1788, a number of swords, spears, arrow heads, etc., were found on the hard clay bottom, which had been covered over, and so preserved, by the accumulated mud. And in the “Gentleman’s Magazine” for that year a list of them was given. The late Sir Joseph Banks, of Revesby Abbey, secured a considerable number of such relics, catalogues of which are given in “Lincolnshire Notes & Queries,” Vols. III. and IV. They consist of arms and utensils of our British, Roman, Saxon, and Danish ancestors. Among the more interesting of these was a whittle, or “anelace,” exactly resembling one described by Greene as part of Chaucer’s dress. [107] In connection with Woodhall were the following:—A sword, probably Saxon, brought up from the Witham bed near “Kirkstead Wath,” entangled in the prongs of an eel-stang. The pommel and guard are tinned, as we now tin the inside of kitchen utensils; an art which we should not have known that our forefathers at that period possessed but for such discoveries as this. The polish still remained on parts of the blade “admirably brilliant.” It bore the inscription + Benvenutus + on one side, and on the other + me fecit +, in Saxon characters; the name shewing that the maker was an Italian, the crosses probably implying that he (or the owner, if made to order) was a Christian; while from the Saxon lettering we should infer that the Italian sword-cutler exercised his craft in the north of Europe. Another sword, with brass scabbard, of elegant workmanship and richly gilt, was found near Bardney. Several more swords, with Saxon and Roman inscriptions, were also found near Bardney.

A dagger was brought up by an eel-stang near “Kirkstead Wath,” the handle, of elm, being in fairly good preservation, the only instance of wood thus surviving. [108a] Several others, one of superior work with an ivory handle, were found in the Witham near Bardney.

A spear head of bone, of British structure, was found in Stixwould in an ancient sewer, which was being cleansed. Sir J. Banks says that “it does credit to the skill of the person who made it.” [108b] Several more of these were found at Bardney and other parts of the Witham; and again at “Kirksted Wath” the eel-stang brought up an iron specimen, which from its appearance would seem to have been broken in action.

A large barbed arrow head was found near Bardney, with an orifice large enough to receive a broom handle. [108c]

A Roman lituus, or clarion, was found near Tattershall Ferry. Though imperfect, both ends being broken off, it is interesting as being probably the only one in existence. This instrument is represented among trophies on the base of Trojan’s column in Rome, and appears on some Roman coins. [108d] A description is given in the “Archæologia” of the Society of Antiquaries (Vol. XIV.) of an iron candlestick, of curious construction, being one of six which were found

in the Witham by Kirkstead. We may well imagine that they, at one time, served to light the refectory of the Abbey, where the monks of old dispensed hospitality to the poor and needy, or to the wayfaring stranger. Perhaps the most interesting relic of all is a British shield, of finely-wrought metal, originally gilt, with a boss of carnelian, and ornamented with elaborate devices, shewing that those primitive people, though living a rude life, had attained to a very considerable degree of skill in working metals. It is described in the “Archæologica” (Vol. XXIII.); and an engraving is given of it in “Fenland” by Skertchly and Miller (p. 463). It was formerly in the Meyrick collection.

The above are a selection of the most interesting objects yielded up to us chiefly by the Witham; there have been many more, but of less importance. Several Roman urns in different places have been exhumed. The parish of Thornton runs down to Kirkstead station, passing almost within a stone’s throw of the Victoria Hotel; and in Thornton a small Roman vase was discovered when the railroad was made, in 1854. The present writer has seen it, but it has, unfortunately, disappeared. An engraving and description of it are given in the “Linc. Architectural Society’s Journal,” Vol. IV., Part II., p. 200. It was nine inches in height, of rather rough construction, and with a rude ornamentation. Two Roman urns, or, according to another account, six (“Lincolnshire N. & Q.” Vol. III., p. 154), were also found at the north-east corner of a field, on the road leading from Stixwould to Bucknall, about 3½ miles from Woodhall. They were of the kind technically termed “smoke burnt.” The soil at the spot was a clay of so tenacious a character that several horse-shoes, some of them of a very old and curious make, have been found in the former quagmire. Several large Roman urns have been found in, or near, Horncastle, and are preserved among the treasures of the late Mechanics’ Institute, having been presented to the town by the sole surviving trustee, Mr. Joseph Willson, to form, with other objects, the nucleus of a local museum at some future time. Engravings of these also are given, with a Paper by Rev. E. Trollope, the late Bishop Suffragan of Nottingham, in the abovementioned Journal, at p. 210.

At Ashby Puerorum, so called because certain lands in the parish go to pay for the choristers of Lincoln Cathedral, in the year 1794, a labourer, cutting a ditch, discovered, three feet

below the surface, a Roman sepulture, a stone chest squared and dressed with much care, in which was deposited an urn of strong glass of greenish hue. The chest was of freestone, such as is common on Lincoln heath. The urn, of elegant shape, contained human bones nearly reduced to ashes, and among them a small lacrimatory of very thin green glass. [110a]