Skegness, now, next to Cleethorpes, the best known and most frequented by excursion “trippers” of all the east coast places, used to be fifty years ago only a little settlement of fishermen who lived in cabins built on the strip of ground between the road and the ditches on each side. A lifeboat shed and an old sea-boat set up on its gunwale for a shelter, with a seat in it, and a flagstaff close by, used chiefly for signalling to a collier to come in, were on the sea bank. Behind it was an hotel, and one thatched house just inside the Roman bank, built by Mr. Edward Walls about 1780. This was cleverly contrived so that not an inch of space was wasted anywhere. It was only one room thick, so that from the same room you could see the sun rise over the sea and set over the Marsh. It was here that Tennyson saw those “wide-winged sunsets of the misty marsh” that he speaks of in “The Last Tournament,” and took delight in their marvellous colouring.
The house rose up from the level behind and below the bank, and the back door was on the ground floor, with a porch and hinged leaves to shut out the terrific wind from N. and E. or N. and W. as required, but on the sea front, access was obtained by a removable plank bridge from the bank top which landed you on the first floor. Here was the summer home of all our family—a children’s paradise—when you ran straight out bare-foot on to the sandy bank and so across the beautiful hard sands and through the salt-water creeks down to the sea. This at high water was close at hand with tumbling waves and seething waters, but at low tide, far as eye could reach was nothing but sand, with the fisherman’s pony and cart, and his donkey and boy at the other end of the shrimp net, moving slowly like specks in the distance along the edge of the far-retreating sea.
This enchanting desolation is now the trippers’ play ground, with stalls and donkeys and swings and sham niggers and a pier and lines of shops. It must be admitted that it has all its old health-giving breezes, and also a fine garden and a cricket field and golf links of the very best. A new line from Lincoln has just been opened (July 1st, 1913), which runs through Coningsby, New Bolingbroke and Stickney, to join the old loop line between Eastville and Steeping, and for a shilling fare will bring thousands from Lincoln, Sheffield and Retford, to have a happy day of nine hours at what the natives call “Skegsnest.”
We have seen that the Romans had a bank all along this coast to keep out the sea, and besides their five roads from Lincoln, one of which went to Horncastle, they had a road from Horncastle to Wainfleet; and a road, part of which we have noticed, from Ulceby to Burgh and Skegness. Skegness lies midway between Ingoldmells, which is the most easterly point of the county, and Gibraltar Point, from which the coast sweeps inland and forms the northern shore of the Wash. Across, on the further side of this, was the Roman camp at Brancaster (Branodunum), and here at Skegness there seems to have been a Roman fort which has now been swallowed up by the sea.
OLD POTTERIES
Near Ingoldmells, about fifty years ago, the sea, at low water, laid bare some Roman potteries, so called, from which the Rev. Edward Elmhirst got several specimens of what were called “thumb bricks.” These were just bits of clay the size of sausages, but twice as thick, some as much as two and a half inches thick and four inches high, which had been squeezed in the hand, the impress of the fingers and thumb being plainly visible; the extremities, being more than the hand could take, were rather bigger than the middle. They were flat enough at each end to stand, and had doubtless been used to place the pottery on when being burnt in the kiln.
It is more than probable that these potteries were pre-Roman. They are about a quarter of a mile south of the Ingoldmells outfall drain, and half way between high and low-water mark. They are only exposed now and then, and appear to be circular kilns about fifteen feet in diameter, with walls two feet thick, and now only a foot high. The reason of their existence is found in a bed of dark clay which underlies all this coast.
The only pot found has been a rough, hand-made jar with rolled edge and marks of the stick or bone with which the outside had been scraped and trimmed. Now, doubtless the Romans used the wheel. Moreover, these kilns are far outside the Roman bank, and not likely, therefore, to be for Roman use. Tree roots are found in the walls and inside the circle of the kilns, of the same sort as those of which at one time a perfect forest existed, the stumps of which are sometimes visible at low tide. At the time the Romans made their sea bank the sea must have come right over this forest, so that we may perhaps say that those thumb-bricks bear the impress of the fingers of the earliest inhabitants of Britain, and are therefore of extraordinary interest.
On the eastern side of South Lindsey the running out of the roads, from Burgh and Wainfleet, to the coast always seemed to point to the existence of some Roman terminus near Skegness. Some years after he had noted this as probable, the Rev. E. H. R. Tatham, who has made a study of Roman roads in Lincolnshire, discovered that in the court rolls of the manor of Ingoldmells, the mention is made of a piece of land called indifferently in a document dated 1345, “Chesterland,” or “Castelland”; and again in 1422, four acres of land in “Chesterland” are mentioned as being surrendered by one William Skalflete (Court Rolls, p. 248), this land is never mentioned again, and the presumption is that it was swallowed by the sea. And in 1540 Leland mentions a statement made to him, that Skegness once had a haven town with a “castle,” but that these had been “clene consumed and eaten up with the se.”
ROMAN CASTRUM