Читать книгу Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire онлайн

79 страница из 129

Returning from Belvoir we can pass by Barrowby to join the Nottingham and Grantham road, which leaves the county at Sedgebrook, on either side of which are seen the churches of Muston and East and West Allington, where Crabbe, the poet, was rector 1789-1814. West Allington church stands in Mr. Welby’s park, and close by, a salt well is marked on the map. At Sedgebrook is a farm house which was built as a manor-house by Sir John Markham in the sixteenth century, when he was Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. He it was who received the soubriquet of “The upright Judge,” on the occasion of his being turned out of office by Edward IV., because of his scrupulous fairness at the trial of Sir Thomas Coke, Lord Mayor of London.

From Sedgebrook to Barrowby is three miles of level ground, and then the road rises 150 feet to the village, which commands a splendid view over the vale of Belvoir. Leaving this you descend a couple of miles to Grantham.

GONERBY HILL

At the outskirts of the town the road meets two others, one the northern or Lincoln road, and the other the north-western or Newark road. This is the Great North Road, and it starts by climbing the famous Gonerby Hill, the terror and effectual trial ground of motors in their earliest days, and described by “mine host” in The Heart of Midlothian as “a murder to post-horses.” The hill once gained affords a fine view eastwards, Foston and Long Bennington (which has a large church with a handsome porch, a good churchyard cross, and a mutilated market cross), are the only villages, till the road crosses the county boundary near Claypole, and runs on about four miles to Newark, distant fifteen miles from Grantham. Long Bennington is a mile north-east of Normanton Lodge, where Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and Leicestershire touch.