Witham Common passed, we come to the village of Colsterworth, built on a rise, with fine views from it of the upland copses and gentle hills and dales of this hunting country, where the Cottesmore, the Atherstone, and the Quorn overrun one another’s boundaries. Colsterworth is the last of the stone-built villages for many a mile to come, red brick reigning from Grantham onwards, to far beyond York. It is a narrow-streeted village, with an old church, closely elbowed by houses beside the road; the church where Sir Isaac Newton and his ancestors worshipped, and where, on the wall of the Newton Chapel, may yet be seen one of the sundials he carved with a penknife when only nine years of age. In a secluded nook, nearly two miles to the left of the highroad, lies Woolsthorpe Manor House, the Newtons’ ancestral home, now a small farmhouse, with a tablet built into the wall of the room where the philosopher was born. The famous apple-tree whose falling fruit suggested the Law of Gravitation has long since disappeared.
Lincolnshire now begins to thoroughly belie its reputation for flatness, the road descending steeply from Colsterworth and rising sharply from Easton Park to the park of Stoke Rochford, with another long sharp descent beyond, and a further rise of some importance into Great Ponton, another of the very small “Great” villages.
Great Ponton, or Paunton Magna, as it was formerly called, was in early days the site of a Roman camp, and of a turnpike gate in latter times. Both have gone to a common oblivion. If the ascent to the tiny village by the highroad is steep, the climb upwards to it by the country lanes from the lowlands on the east, where the Great Northern Railway takes its easeful course, is positively precipitous. Overlooking the pleasant vale from its commanding eyrie stands the beautiful old church, in a by-way off the main road; the church itself strikingly handsome, but the pinnacled and battlemented tower its peculiar glory. It is distinctly of the ornate Somersetshire type, and a very late example of Perpendicular work. Having been built in 1519, when Gothic had reached its highest development, and Renaissance ideals were slowly but surely obtaining a hold in this country, we find in its lavish ornamentation and abundant panelling an attempt to combine the florid alien Renaissance conventions with that peculiarly insular phase of Gothic, the Perpendicular style. The result is, as it chances, happy in this instance, the new methods halting before that little further development which would have made this a debased example. The building of this tower was the work of Anthony Ellys, merchant of the staple, and of his wife, as a thank-offering for a prosperous career, and of an escape from religious persecution; and his motto, “Thynke and thanke God of all,” is still visible, carved on three sides. His house, a crow-stepped old mansion next the church, is still standing, and recalls the legend of his sending home a cask from his warehouses in Calais, labelled “Calais sand.” Arriving home, he asked his wife what she had done with the “sand.” She had put it in the cellar. He then revealed the fact that it contained, not sand, but the greater part of his wealth.
Prominent on the south-east pinnacle of this tower is a curious vane in the shape of a fiddle. The legend told of it says that, many years ago, there wandered amid the fenland villages of Lincolnshire a poor fiddler who gained a scanty livelihood by playing at fairs and weddings, and not infrequently in the parlours of the village inns on Saturday nights. After some years of this itinerant minstrelsy, he amassed a sufficient sum of money wherewith to pay his fare as a steerage passenger to the United States, to which country his relatives had emigrated some time before. In course of time, this once almost poverty stricken fiddler became rich through land speculation in the backwoods; and, revisiting the scenes of his tuneful pilgrimages in the new character of a wealthy man, offered to repair this then dilapidated church, as some sort of recognition of the kindnesses shown him in bygone years. Only one stipulation was made by him, that a vane representing his old fiddle should take the place of the weathercock. This was agreed to, and, as we see, that quaint emblem is there to this day.
Candour, however, compels the admission that this pretty legend has no truth in it; but the story has frequently found its way into print, and so is in a fair way to become a classic. The original fell in 1899 and was broken. The then rector would have replaced it with another vane of different character, but the old folk were attached to their fiddle, and so a replica was made by subscription, and fixed; and there it is to-day: the first fiddle, said the rector, that ever he heard of in the guise of a wind-instrument!
Among the many curious inn-signs along the road, that of the “Blue Horse,” at Great Ponton, is surely one of the most singular, and is a zoological curiosity not readily explained.
XXVII
Grantham, one hundred and ten and a quarter miles from London by road, and five miles less by rail, is three miles and a half distant from Great Ponton. Entered down the very long and steep descent of Spitalgate Hill, the utterly modernised character of the town becomes at once apparent, and all pleasurable anticipations based upon memories of the lettered ease of Stamford are instantly dispelled. The expectant traveller comes to Grantham hopeful of a fine old town with streets and buildings befitting its historic dignity; but these hopes are soon dispelled by grimy engine-shops and roads gritty with coal-dust, giving earnest of an aggressive modernity fully unfolded when the level is reached and the town entered at Spitalgate and St. Peter’s Hill. Grantham is a red-brick town, and modern red brick at that. A cruelly vulgar Town Hall, all variegated brick, iron crestings, and general spikiness, fondly believed to be “Italian,” testifies at once to the expansive prosperity of Grantham and to its artlessness. This monument of Grantham’s pride faces the grass-plots that border the broad thoroughfare of St. Peter’s Hill (which is flat, and not a hill at all) where stand bronze statues of Sir Isaac Newton, Grantham’s great man, and of a certain Frederick James Tollemache, M.P. for Grantham, who departed this life in 1888, after having probably achieved some kind of local celebrity which, whatever it may have been, has not sent the faintest echo to the outer world. It is an odd effigy, representing the departed legislator in an Inverness cloak, and holding in his right hand a something which looks curiously like a billiard-cue, but is probably intended for some kind of official wand. The untutored might be excused for thinking this a monument to a champion billiard-player.