To finish our day and get into “the parts of Lindsey,” we take the north road from Holbeach over Fosdyke bridge to Boston. In the church at Fosdyke we may see a remarkable font with a tall Perpendicular oak cover similar, but not equal in beauty, to that at Frieston.
Before 1814, people who wished to go from Boston into the eastern half of Holland and on to Cambridge and Norfolk had to cross the Welland estuary by ferry or go round by Spalding, but in 1811 an Act was passed for erecting a bridge at Fosdyke Wash and making a causeway to it over the sands. The work was designed by Rennie, who had an excellent patron in Sir Joseph Banks. The account of it, written at the time, is curious. The bridge was 300 feet long and had eight openings, the three in mid-stream being thirty feet wide, and the centre one opened with two leaves, which, having a counterpoise, were easily moved from a horizontal to a perpendicular position by means of a large rack-wheel and pinion wound by a common hand-winch. The nine piers were each made of oak trees driven in whole in clusters of six. These trees were none of them less than thirty feet long and eighteen inches in diameter, rather larger than the beams used to carry the floors in Tattershall Castle.[37] Those in the four central piers were enormous, being forty-two feet long and nineteen inches in diameter. They were driven in twenty to twenty-two feet below the bottom of the river and bolted together with timbers a foot thick. All was carried out in oak, the roadway planks being three inches thick. I went to see this stout old timber bridge and was disgusted to find that a grey-painted iron structure had taken its place.
From Fosdyke the road passes Algarkirk and strikes the Spalding and Boston main road at Sutterton, where it turns north to Kirton. After passing Kirton—the magnificent church of which place was so strangely altered and mutilated by a ruthless architect called Hayward, in 1804, who pulled down its noble central tower and its double-aisled transept and built of the old materials a handsome but new tower at the west end—we soon see on the right, first Frampton and then Wyberton, the latter only about a mile south of Boston.
FRAMPTON AND WYBERTON
Frampton, once cruciform with a good tower and spire, has lost its north transept, its tall Early English pillars now support arches of a later style, but a fine oak roof and tall screen remain. There is an odd monument of ecclesiastical power on a buttress outside at the angle of the transept. A figurehead grotesquely carved, with the inscription, “Wot ye whi I sta̅d her [know ye, why I stand here] for I forswor my Savior ego Ricardus in Angulo,” probably a lasting reference to some ecclesiastical penance.
Frampton Hall, a good Queen Anne house, is close to the church. Here, as in several of the Marsh churches, rings to tie horses to during service may be seen in the wall. Not a mile away northwards is Wyberton, which, if built as planned, would have been a very fine edifice. When it was restored by G. Scott, Jun., in 1881, the floor of the chancel being lowered brought to light two magnificent pillar bases. These, with the grand chancel arch, are indications that a fine cruciform church was projected but apparently never carried out. Tall arcades with clustered and octagonal columns and a good Perpendicular roof with carved bosses and angels are there now, and signs that an earlier building existed are visible in stones either lying loose or built into the walls. A slab to Adam Frampton is dated 1325.
The font is a very rich one of the same period as those to the north-east of Boston, at Benington and Leverton. The registers begin as early as 1538. We pass now through Boston, and crossing the sluice bridge, get a fine view of the tall tower by the water-side and soon strike the Sibsey and Spilsby road.
A grand black thunder-cloud rolls up across the fen, and having discharged a tempest of hailstones on the Wolds, descends upon us between Sibsey and Stickney in torrents of rain. It passes, and the bright sunshine—the “clear shining after rain” of the Hebrew prophet—contrasted with the darkness of the moving thunder-clouds as they roll seawards, makes a fine picture, and one which in that flat land you can watch for miles as it moves.
AGRICULTURAL RETURNS