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But to return to our Witham river. This keeps due north by North-Witham, Colsterworth, Easton, Stoke Rockford, Great and Little Ponton to Grantham, a distance of ten miles. The church at North Wytham has a long nave, a narrow massive Norman chancel arch, and the floor descending to the east. In the 1887 restoration by Withers, a choir was formed out of the east end of the nave, and the chancel has been left as a monumental chapel for the Sherard family monuments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a decidedly clever arrangement. Robert Sherard seems to have been a scholar, for he occupied his thoughts when on his deathbed in writing twenty-six Latin elegiacs now on his brass and dated 1592.

WOOLSTHORPE. THE NEWTON CHAPEL

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

From Colsterworth a road runs east past Twyford Forest, twelve miles to Bourne. In the church, which is both Norman, Decorated, and Perpendicular, there is the Newton chapel, with tombs of Sir Isaac’s parents and grandparents. This is modern, but is on the site of the old Woolsthorpe Manor chapel. It contains a sundial with an inscription, which says that it was cut by Newton when a boy of nine. His baptism appears in the Register thus:—“Isaac son of Isaac and Hanna Newton Janʳʸ 1, 1643.” She was an Ayscough, and married for her second husband the Rev. Barnabas Smith of North Wytham. On the left bank of the Witham, at a distance of half a mile, is the hamlet of Woolsthorpe, which must not be confused with the Woolsthorpe near Belvoir. The name was probably Wolph’s or Ulfsthorpe, and nothing to do with Wool. In Domesday Book it is Ulstanthorp. In Woolsthorpe Manor House Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1641. The window is shown from which he saw the apple fall and the Newton Arms—two cross-bones—are sculptured over the door. In the days of the Commonwealth he was at Bishop Fox’s school at Grantham, 1651-1656. His mother thought to make a farmer of him, but kindly fate took him to Cambridge when he was eighteen, and he spent more than four years there, taking his degree in 1665. The incident of the apple dates from 1666, the year of the great Plague and the Fire of London. Starting from this he deduced the reasons for the movement of the planets which Galileo in 1610 and Copernicus in 1540 had noted. He had by this time accumulated much of the material for his great work the “Principia,” and for the next thirty years he worked and wrote unceasingly. He was appointed Master of the Mint in 1695, and President of the Royal Society in 1703, and was knighted in 1705. He died in March, 1727. His own view of his life’s work may be given in his own words: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” After lying in state in the Jerusalem Chamber he was buried in Westminster Abbey, the Lord Chancellor, two dukes, and three earls being pall-bearers; his monument, near the entrance to the choir on the north side, shows a recumbent figure with the right arm on four folios named Divinity, Chronology, Optics, and Phil. Prin. Math. Above is a large globe showing the planets, etc., projecting from a pyramid, and on the globe the figure of Astronomy with a closed book, in a very pensive mood. Below is a bas-relief representing Newton’s various labours and discoveries.