Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

The severe three-light east window has good glass by Kempe. The spire, a very good one, is later than the tower, and built of squared stones, different in colour from the small stones of the tower. Two half figures incised in bold relief on fourteenth century slabs, are built into the north wall, opposite the south door.

HONINGTON AND CAYTHORPE

Keeping along the Lincoln road the next place we reach is Honington. The Early English tower of the church is entered by a very early pointed arch, the nave being of massive Norman work with an unusually large corbel table. There are the remains of a stone screen, and a canopied aumbry in the chancel was perhaps used as an Easter sepulchre. The chantry chapel has monuments of the Hussey family, and one of W. Smith, 1550, in gown and doublet. An early slab, with part of the effigy of a priest on it, has been used over again to commemorate John Hussey and his wife, he being described on it as “A professor of the Ghospell,” 1587. To the south-east of the village is what was once an important British fort with a triple ditch, used later by the Romans whose camp at Causennæ on the “High Dyke” was but four miles to the east. Less than two miles brings us to Carlton Scroop, with a late Norman tower and Early English arcade, also some good old glass and a Jacobean pulpit. The remains of a rood screen and the rood loft steps are still there.

A mile further on is one of the many Normantons, with Early English nave, decorated tower, fine west window, and Perpendicular clerestory.

FULBECK AND LEADENHAM

Two miles on we come to Caythorpe, which is built on a very singular plan, for it has a double nave with a buttress between the two west windows to take the thrust of the arches which are in a line with the ridge of the roof. This forms the remarkable feature of the church interior. There are short transepts, and the tower rises above the four open arches. Over one of these there is a painting of the Last Judgment. There are fine buttresses outside with figures of the Annunciation and the Coronation of the Virgin, and one of our Lord on the porch. The windows are large. The spire is lofty but unpleasing, as it has a marked “entasis” or set in, such as is seen in many Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire spires, which hence are often termed sugar-loafed. Before its re-building, in 1859, after it had been struck by lightning, the entasis was still more marked than it is now. The singularly thin, ugly needle-like spire of Glinton, just over the southern border of the county near Deeping, has a slight set in which does not improve its appearance. A mile to the north the road passes through the very pretty village of Fulbeck. The dip of the road, the charming old houses, grey and red, the handsome church tower with its picturesque pinnacles, and the ancestral beauty of the fine trees, make a really lovely picture. Fine iron gates lead to the Hall, the home of the Fanes, an honoured name in Lincolnshire. Many of the name rest in the churchyard, and their monuments fill the dark church, which has a good Norman font. The tampering with old walls and old buildings is always productive of mischief, and, as at Bath Abbey, when, to add to its appearance, flying buttresses were put up all along the nave, the weight began to crush in the nave walls, and the only remedy was to put on, at great expense, a stone groined roof, which is the real raison d’être of flying buttresses, so here at Fulbeck, when they pulled down the chancel and built it up again with the walls further out, the consequence was that the east wall of the nave, missing its accustomed support, began to lean out eastwards.

Another mile and a half brings us to Leadenham, where the east and west road from Sleaford to Newark crosses the Great North road. The fine tall spire is seen from all the country round, for it stands half way up the cliff. But this and the rest of the road to Lincoln is described in Chapter [XIII.]

HARLAXTON AND DENTON

If you go out of Grantham by the south-west, you should stop at a very pretty little village to the south of the Grantham and Melton road, from which a loop descends to an old gateway, all that is left of the old Harlaxton Manor, a pretty Tudor building now pulled down, the stone balustrades in front of it having been removed by Mr. Pearson Gregory to his large house a mile off, built on the ridge of the park by Salvin in 1845. The Flemish family of De Ligne lived in the old Hall in Jacobean times, and their predecessors are probably represented by the fine but mutilated alabaster recumbent effigies now in the northern, or Trinity, chapel of the church. In the north-east angle of this chapel is a very graceful canopied recess on a bracket, much like those at Sedgebrook, about five miles off on the border of the county.

The north aisle and nave are older than the tower and south aisle; and a curious staircase ascends at the east of the south aisle wall, from which a gangway crossed to the rood loft.