For many years the head of the figure had disappeared, but when the church was restored, some years since, an ingenious mason fitted him with another which had, in the usual careless fashion of restorers, been knocked off something else. And it is a simple truth that since its “restoration,” Water Newton church is sadly bare.
By the wayside, on the left, against the wall of a farm-house residence, will be noticed an old milestone and horseman’s upping-block combined. It marks the 81st mile from London, and bears the initials “E. B.,” together with the date, 1708. This is perhaps the only survivor of a series which, according to De Foe, in his “Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain,” a Mr. Boulter was projecting “to London, for the general benefit.”
Edmund Boulter was one of the family who were then seated at Gawthorp Hall, near Leeds, and who, not much later, sold that property to Henry Lascelles, father of the first Lord Harewood.
At the hamlet of Sibson, on the left hand in descending toward the level-crossing at Wansford station, may still be seen the stocks and whipping-post beside the road. To the right flows the winding Nene, through illimitable oozy meadows, its course marked in the far distance by the pollard willows that line its banks. The Nene here divides the counties of Huntingdonshire and Northants, Wansford itself lying in the last-mentioned county and Stibbington on the hither side of the river. The famous Wansford Bridge joins the two, and helps to render Wansford and Stibbington one place in the eyes of strangers. Both places belong to the Duke of Bedford, Stibbington bearing the mark of its ownership distinctly visible in its severe and uncomfortable-looking “model” modern-gothic stone houses, with the coroneted “B” on their gables. In this manner the accursed Russells have bedevilled many of the villages and townlets unhappily owned by them, and the feelings of all who live in their earmarked houses must be akin to those of paupers who inhabit workhouses and infirmaries, with the important exception that the Duke’s tenants pay rent and taxes. Wansford, fortunately, has not been rebuilt, and it is possible for the villagers to live without an uncomfortable sense of belonging, body and soul, to the Dukes of Bedford.
The famous “Haycock” inn, usually spoken of as at Wansford, is, in fact, on the Huntingdonshire side of the bridge, and in Stibbington. Its sign alludes to the supposed origin of the curious nick-name of “Wansford-in-England,” first mentioned in that scarce little early eighteenth-century book, Drunken Barnaby’s Four Journeys to the North of England. In its pages he describes being carried off by a flood:—
“On a haycock sleeping soundly,
Th’ River rose and took me roundly
Down the current: People cry’d;
Sleeping, down the Stream I hy’d:
‘Where away,’ quoth they, ‘from Greenland?’
‘No, from Wansforth-brigs in England.’”
This “in England” has puzzled many. It really refers to the situation of Wansford in Northamptonshire, near, but not in, “Holland”—the Holland division of Lincolnshire.
