About five miles further, we come to the suburbs of Grimsby, and the road runs on past Clee to Cleethorpes.
It is curious how different localities, though in the same neighbourhood, have their own special and different terms for the same thing, thus: alongside the ridge north of Lincoln, each village has its bit of “Cliff,” and from Elsham to the Humber each has its bit of “Wold,” while on the continuation of the Wold near Caistor from Barnetby to Burgh-on-Bain the same thing is called neither “Cliff” nor “Wold,” but “top”; and we have Somerby, Owmby, Grasby, Audleby, Fornaby, Rothwell, Orby, Binbrook, Girsby and Burgh “top,” etc. There is an Owmby “Cliff” as well as an Owmby “top,” but the words sufficiently indicate the position of the villages—one (near Fillingham) on the Ermine Street, and one (near Grasby) north of Caistor.
THE PELHAM PILLAR
There is no view, I think, in the county so wide all round as that from the top of the Pelham Pillar. It stands on one of the highest points of the Wold, from whence the ground falls on three sides. In front are the woods of Brocklesby and the mausoleum, with the Humber and Hull in the distance; on the right Grimsby, the Spurn Point, and the grand spire of Patrington in Holderness, and on the left the wide mid-Lincolnshire plain as far as “the Cliff.” Of the Wold villages between Caistor and Barnetby, where the Wold stops for a couple of miles and lets the railway and the Brigg-to-Brocklesby road through on the level, none affords a better view than Grasby. But the whole of this road is one not to be missed. As we pass along it we first reach Clixby, which shows, or rather hides, a tiny church in a thick clump of trees by the road side, where is a churchyard cross, restored after the model of Somersby. The little stone church has been once very dilapidated, and is now renewed with a double bell-turret in brick—no wonder it hides itself in the trees. There is also a remarkable modern graveyard cross of dark stone, of a very early primitive shape, such as is seen on some of the incised grave stones of Northumbria. North of Clixby is Grasby. This church was the home for over forty years of the poet’s brother Charles Tennyson-Turner, the author, with Alfred, of the “Poems by Two Brothers,” and afterwards of many sonnets written at Grasby. It would be difficult to surpass the charm of one called ‘Letty’s Globe’:
LETTY’S GLOBE.
When Letty had scarce passed her third glad year,
And her young artless words began to flow,
One day we gave the child a coloured sphere
Of the wide earth, that she might mark and know,
By tint and outline, all its sea and land.