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RIPPINGALE

The Heckington road, after leaving the “Street,” passes through Dunsby and Dowsby, where there is an old Elizabethan house once inhabited by the Burrell family. Rippingale lies off to the left between the two and has in its church a rood screen canopy but no screen, which is very rare, and a large number of old monuments from the thirteenth century onwards, the oldest being two thirteenth century knights in chain mail of the family of Gobaud, who lived at the Hall, now the merest ruin, where they were succeeded by the Bowet, Marmion, Haslewood and Brownlow families. An effigy of a deacon with the open book of the Gospels has this unusual inscription, “Ici git Hwe Geboed le palmer le fils Jhoan Geboed. Millᵒ 446 Prees pur le alme.” It is interesting to find here a fifteenth century monument to a Roger de Quincey. Was he, I wonder, an ancestor of the famous opium eater? There is in the pavement a Marmion slab of 1505. The register records the death in July, 1815, of “the Lincolnshire Giantess” Anne Hardy, aged 16, height 7 ft. 2 in. The Brownlow family emigrated hence to Belton near Grantham. They had another Manor House at Great Humby, which is just half-way between Rippingale and Belton, of which the little brick-built domestic chapel now serves as a church. As we go on we notice that the whole of the land eastwards is a desolate and dreary fen, which extends from the Welland in the south to the Witham near Lincoln. Of this Fenland, the Witham, when it turns southwards, forms the eastern boundary, and alongside of it goes the Lincoln and Boston railway, while the line from Bourne viâ Sleaford and on to Lincoln forms the western boundary. I use the term ‘fen’ in the Lincolnshire sense for an endless flat stretch of black corn-land without tree or hedge, and intersected by straight-cut dykes or drains in long parallels. This is the winter aspect; in autumn, when the wind blows over the miles of ripened corn, the picture is a very different one.