Читать книгу Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire онлайн

40 страница из 129

THE GLEN AND THE EDEN

Both these streams are of considerable length, the course of the Glen measured without its windings being five and thirty miles, and that of the Witham as much again.

All the other streams which go from the ridge drain eastwards into the fens, and they effectually kept the fens under water until the Romans cut the Carr Dyke, intercepting the water from the hills and taking it into the river.

IRNHAM

To follow the “Glen” from its source in the high ground between Somerby and Boothby Pagnell to its most southerly point two miles below Braceborough, will take us through a very pleasant country. A tributary, the first of many, runs in from Bassingthorpe, whose church, like that of Burton Coggles, three miles to the south, is dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury. A beautiful little house, built here by the Grantham wool merchant, Thomas Coney, in 1568, has a counterpart at Ponton in the immediate neighbourhood, where Antony Ellys, also a merchant of the staple at Calais, built himself a charming little Tudor house about the same time. Augmented by the Bassingthorpe brook, the Glen goes on past Bitchfield, Burton-Coggles and Corby, and on between Swayfield and Swinstead to Creeton, where are to be seen many stone coffins, probably of the monks of Vaudey Abbey in Grimsthorpe Park, a corruption of Valdei (Vallis dei or God’s Vale). It then winds along by Little Bytham, and, passing Careby and Carlby, gets into a plain country, and turns north near Shillingthorpe Hall. The last place it sees before entering the region of the Bedford Levels is Gretford. But near the church of Wilsthorpe—in which is the effigy of a thirteenth century knight with the arms of the Wake family, who claim descent from the famous Hereward the Wake—we find another stream joining the Glen to help it on its straight-cut course through Deeping fen. We may well spend an afternoon in tracing this stream from its source some sixteen miles away. It flows all the way through a valley of no great width, and, with the exception of Edenham, undistinguished by any villages. A purely rustic stream, it is known as the Eden, though it has no name on the maps, and its only distinction since it left its source near Humby is that it divides the villages of Lenton or Lavington, where the author of “Verdant Green,” Rev. E. Bradley, best known as “Cuthbert Bede,” was once rector, and Ingoldsby, the village of Ingold or Ingulph, the Dane, which, however, has nothing to do with the well-known “Ingoldsby Legends.” A little to the south of Ingoldsby are the prettily named villages Irnham, Kirkby-Underwood, and Rippingale; of these Irnham has a picturesque Tudor hall in a fine park. This was built in 1510 by Richard Thimelby in the form of the letter L; the north wing was mostly destroyed by fire in 1887, but the great hall remains, and there is a priest’s hiding-place entered by a hinged step in the stairs in which was found a straw pallet and a book of hours.