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THE LIMESTONE SPRINGS

We must now get back to Stamford. Even the road which goes due north to Bourne soon finds itself outside the county; for Stamford is placed on a mere tongue or long pointed nose of land belonging to Lincolnshire, in what is aptly termed the Wapentake of ‘Ness.’ However, after four miles in Rutland, it passes the four cross railroads at Essendine Junction, and soon after re-crosses the boundary near Carlby. Essendine Church consists simply of a Norman nave and chancel. Here, a little to the right lies Braceborough Spa, where water gushes from the limestone at the rate of a million and a half gallons daily. This is a great district for curative springs. There is one five miles to the west at Holywell which, with its stream and lake and finely timbered grounds, is one of the beauty spots of Lincolnshire, and at the same distance to the north are the strong springs of Bourne. We hear of a chalybeate spring “continually boiling” or gushing up, for it was not hot, near the church at Billingborough, and another at Stoke Rochford, each place a good ten miles from Bourne and in opposite directions. Great Ponton too, near Stoke Rochford, is said to “abound in Springs of pure water rising out of the rock and running into the river Witham.” The church at Braceborough had a fine brass once to Thomas De Wasteneys, who died of the Black Death in 1349. After Carlby there is little of interest on the road itself till it tops the hill beyond Toft whence, on an autumn day, a grand view opens out across the fens to the Wash and to Boston on the north-east, and the panorama sweeps southward past Spalding to the time-honoured abbey of Croyland, and on again to the long grey pile of Peterborough Minster, once islands in a trackless fen (the impenetrable refuge of the warlike and unconquered Gervii or fenmen), but now a level plain of cornland covered, as far as eye can see, with the richest crops imaginable. A little further north we reach the Colsterworth road, and turning east, enter the old town of Bourne, now only notable as the junction of the Great Northern and Midland Railways. Since 1893 the inhabitants have used an “e” at the end of the name to distinguish it from Bourn in Cambridgeshire. Near the castle hill is a strong spring called “Peter’s Pool,” or Bournwell-head, the water of which runs through the town and is copious enough to furnish a water supply for Spalding. This castle, mentioned by Ingulphus in his history of Croyland Abbey, existed in the eleventh century; possibly the Romans had a fort here to guard both the ‘Carr Dyke’ which passes by the east side of the town, and also the King’s Street, a Roman road which, splitting off from the Ermine Street at Castor, runs through Bourne due north to Sleaford. There was an outer moat enclosing eight acres, and an inner moat of one acre, inside which “on a mount of earth cast up with mene’s hands” stood the castle, once the stronghold of the Wakes. To-day a maze of grassy mounds alone attests the site, amongst which the “Bourn or Brunne gushes out in a strong clear stream.” Marrat in his “History of Lincolnshire” tells us that as early as 870 Morchar, Lord of Brun, fell fighting at the battle of Threekingham. Two hundred years later we have “Hereward the Wake” living at Bourn, and in the twelfth century “Hugh De Wac” married Emma, daughter and heir of Baldwin FitzGilbert, who led some of King Stephen’s forces in the battle of Lincoln and refused to desert his king. Hugh founded the abbey of Bourn in 1138 on the site of an older building of the eighth or ninth century.