A hundred years ago the ‘hoy,’ a sloop-rigged packet, used to take passengers from Barton Waterside Inn, just north of Barton, to Hull; and Sir J. Nelthorpe notes in his pocket book, under date August 9th, 1793. “arrived at Scawby after a very bad passage over the Humber, having been on the water five hours, and at last forced to run on shore in Barrow Haven, not being able to make Barton, owing to the negligence of the boatmen in not leaving Hull in time; my horses, seven in number, remained in the boat from four o’clock in the morning till seven at night, before they could be landed.”
Coming back from the Cliff Edge road, we turn up the hill for Barton-on-Humber, and from the top of the Wold, which here comes to an end, we get a really beautiful and extended view in all directions. But we must now speak of Barton, with its two old churches.
BARTON-ON-HUMBER
BARTON-ON-HUMBER
Barton-on-Humber had a market and a ferry when Domesday Book was compiled, and was a bigger port than Hull. At the Conquest it was given to the King’s nephew, Gilbert of Ghent, son of Baldwin Earl of Flanders, whose seat was at Folkingham. The ferry is still used, and the Hull cattle boats mostly start from Barton landing-stage, but most of the passenger traffic is from the railway pier at New Holland, four miles to the east. The town is a mile from the waterside. It has two fine churches, of which St. Peter’s is one of the earliest in England; curiously one of the same type of Saxon church is also at a Barton, Earl’s Barton in Northants, and not far from it is another of similar date, at Brixworth, which is held to be the most noteworthy of all the early churches in England. Barnack and Wittering in the same county are also of the same style and of the same antiquity, and at Dover, at Bradford-on-Avon, and at Worth and Sompting in Sussex are others similar. Stow, near Lincoln, Broughton near Brigg, and Hough-on-the-Hill, and the two Lincoln towers and Bracebridge, are of similar age, but these last, like Clee and so many in the neighbourhood of Grimsby, Caistor and Gainsborough, have little but their tower or part of their tower left that can be called Saxon, while at Stow, and some of the churches in the other counties mentioned, there is more to see of the original building.
The last restoration of St. Peter’s, Barton, in 1898, has put the church into good condition and left the old work at the west end much as it was a thousand years ago; probably the church at first was very like what we may still see at Brixworth. The tower outside is divided into panels by strips of stone, which go deep into the walls and project from the rubble masonry, as at Barnack. This has been aptly termed “Stone carpentry,” but cannot really be a continuation in stone of a previously existing method of building with a wooden framework, such as we see in the half-timbered houses of the south of England, because that method of building was later. It is possibly a method imported from Germany; certainly the double light with the mid-wall jamb came from Northern Italy to the Rhenish provinces, and may have come on to England from thence. Hence it has been termed “Teutonic Romanesque.”
The Avon at Barton-on-Humber.
A SAXON CHURCH
ST. PETER’S, BARTON