Lincolnshire Towers

St. Wulfram’s church, Grantham, 3rd November, 2018.

Of all our counties I suspect few more strongly than Lincolnshire of keeping hidden, somewhere, the last remaining corner of Deep England.  For a start, there is so much of it in which to hide: after North Yorkshire it is the second-largest of the ceremonial counties, while the density of its population is the seventh lowest overall (ranking forty-second of forty-eight).  All that undisturbed, unmotorwayed acreage, almost as wide as mid-Wales, largely spared by industry and development, and unblemished by any major conurbation, in which Deep England might yet linger.  The river Trent, the Humber estuary, the Fens and the Wash, once its arteries of commerce, have come to serve as buffers against the cutting edges of modernity; and even its western, inlandmost parts are only incidentally served by the Great North Road and the East Coast Main Line (which latter never comes within thirty miles of that coast while Lincolnshire has anything to do with it).  It is true that the county has a grittier side — Scunthorpe steelworks, the port of Grimsby with its face set like flint against the North Sea, or the austerely dead-flat southern Fens — but its heart, the landscape of the Wolds or south Kesteven, has an otherworldly softness, even a tameness, about it.  That homeliness is matched by the place-names, among which even those of Danish derivation retain only a slight angularity: Willoughby… Hagworthingham… Scamblesby… Then there are all the old railway stations whose names appear in Flanders and Swann’s song ‘The Slow Train’, hinting at the heavy blow struck here by the Beeching Axe: Mumby Road, Dogdyke, Tumby Woodhouse.  Even the name of the county, with its buttery consonants, has a welcoming warmth to it.  And consider Bag Enderby in the light of Bag End, the name of Bilbo Baggins’ home in Tolkien’s Middle Earth.  If in these parts the mythical Shire can shimmer just beneath the surface, then why not very Deep England itself?

It is worth noting, too, that many Yellow-Bellies themselves — as Lincolnshire people are called — can fairly be said to be in sympathy with the ideals of Deep England. One of the most famous, indeed the son of a rector of Bag Enderby, and born nearby at Somersby, was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose verses tell of Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and vanished Lyonesse, and of many things loved and lost.  Or there is the late Roger Scruton, arguably the most articulate defender of Deep England in the past forty years, who began life in the tiny hamlet of Buslingthorpe near Market Rasen.  I concede, however, that Isaac Newton (Woolsthorpe) and Margaret Thatcher (Grantham) are harder to square with this list…

In any case, Lincolnshire has form where the preservation of Deep England is concerned.  The March of Progress always seems to be missing Lincs: is it too much to hope to find something that it has left alone altogether?  Not necessarily, is Lincolnshire’s murmured answer.  I think of Ruddock’s, the old-fashioned stationers and bookshop in Lincoln’s High Street, to which I paid tribute here at the time of its sad demise in 2017.  Or the quirky Bubble Car Museum near Boston.  And Lincolnshire sausages of course, the glorious centrepiece of any Full Deep English Breakfast.  Then there is another, less tangible but momentous example: whereas, in more urbanised parts of the country, who knows how many traditional folk-songs had been forgotten by the end of the nineteenth century, in Lincolnshire some were still remembered.  Here the last folk-singers lived just late enough to coincide with the earliest recording equipment and the Edwardian folk-song revival which saved so many tunes from extinction.  It was in the north of the county that the composer Percy Grainger discovered, and duly recorded and transcribed, such beautiful melodies as ‘Brigg Fair’ or ‘Rufford Park Poachers’.  That we can hear the voice of Joseph Taylor of Saxby-All-Saints, a man born in 1832, singing the songs of his youth, is cause to be thankful not only for Grainger and the singers who sang for him, but for the county which had preserved that folk-memory for so long.  Those songs are not only artefacts of the past, but to many ears some of its profoundest and most vivid evocations: this is borne out by the misty and chromatic arrangements that many composers made of them, Grainger’s own ‘Lincolnshire Posy’ being an example.*  Things linger in Lincolnshire: the old is slow to fade, and the new takes time to set in.  As I was once told by the guide on a rooftop tour of Lincoln Cathedral: "When the cranes go up in Lincoln, you know there’s a recession on the way."

This is not simply happenstance, either.  The county has a definite streak of rebelliousness, and its people stick by their principles.  I count very much in their favour the Lincolnshire Rising of 1536 against the Dissolution of the Monasteries, which in turn sparked off the Pilgrimage of Grace, the most serious popular opposition to confront Henry VIII; also the Lincolnshire Martyrs, who include two canonised saints.  The knowledge that Henry VIII hated Lincolnshire, declaring it ‘one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm’, only makes me fonder of it still.  Less clear-cut morally is the tradition (if that’s the word) of poaching, which does, it must be said, have in its defence the injustice of the eighteenth-century enclosures of common land by wealthy land-owners.  The song ‘Rufford Park Poachers’, as sung by Joseph Taylor, with its pleasingly defiant declaration —

A buck or doe, believe it so,
A pheasant or an hare,
Were put on earth for everyone
Quite equal for to share […]

— captures the spirit, as does the more famous ditty ‘The Lincolnshire Poacher’ (apparently a favourite of George IV; presumably it was not his hares that were being filched!).  Those landowners had come to see the land merely as an asset or a useful resource, whereas for the poachers and ordinary folk it was simply home, and home for their minds and spirits as much as for their empty stomachs.  To this day, it is not Lincolnshire’s way to follow the herd or pay heed to fashion overmuch, and this tendency to dig in heels, combined with the fondness for old things, creates conditions highly favourable, I would say, to the secret abiding of Deep England.

For it is not altogether unthinkingly that Deep England drowses green and gold in the haze of the afternoon.  I like to believe that those who dwell in that lost land are awake and alive to truth and beauty, pondering great thoughts and bold deeds over another hearty round of ale.  The proof that such folk did once live in Lincolnshire —  if they do not live there still — is plain to see in the heirlooms they left us, which stand amid the low rises and shallow hollows of this gentle county, startling us with their beauty: I mean the towers, the great audacious medieval church towers, with their youthful exuberance, their sheer verticality, which everywhere point heavenwards.

The crossing tower of Lincoln Cathedral, 20 March 2014.  With its original spire, it once stood at 520 feet; without, it is now 271 feet high.

There is of course Lincoln Cathedral — in John Ruskin’s estimation ‘out and out the most precious piece of architecture in the British Isles and roughly speaking worth any two other cathedrals we have’ — which, when it still had its spires, was the tallest building in the world from 1311 to 1548.  The highest spire, 520 feet tall, crowned a county that never naturally rises higher than 551 feet above sea level.  But these are not Lincolnshire’s only towers.  The relative prosperity of this region in the Middle Ages, as well as its ready access to the raw material of the Great Limestone Belt (which stretches south-west from Lincolnshire’s Kesteven through Rutland, Northamptonshire and the Cotswolds, all the way to Somerset), provided conditions favourable to the building of great towers by any self-respecting town.  So it is that Lincolnshire came to possess some of England’s greatest treasures.  At Louth it boasts the tallest medieval parish church tower in England, St James’s, whose spire stands at 287 feet.  St. Botolph’s at Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’) has the tallest church tower to its roof: instead of tapering to a spire, the masonry shoots straight upwards to a height of 266 feet.  The spire of Grantham’s church of St. Wulfram, 274 feet high, sweeps into sight at 105mph when beheld, sudden, serene, from express trains on the East Coast Main line.  And hundreds of other towers, less lofty but all distinctive, all dignified, lay claim to their segment of the wide Lincolnshire sky, each raised up in intercession for its parish and all souls there dwelling.**  That is because the folk of these parts in the Middle Ages committed their wool-wealth to the dressing of their homeland for Heaven, ornamenting this lowest-lying of counties with ardent upliftings of passionate stone.

As Julian Flannery says so movingly in ‘Fifty English Steeples’, an epic volume of detailed architectural surveys of medieval church towers, and one of the most treasured books on my shelves, 

England was never more beautiful than in the two brief decades between the completion of Louth [church tower in September 1515] and the arrival of the English Reformation.  The pre-industrial landscape was dominated by the steeples of 17 cathedrals, 900 monasteries and 9,000 churches.  The spire of Lincoln Cathedral was the highest man-made structure the world had ever seen, and the construction of the great chapels at Westminster, Windsor and Cambridge had reached its magnificent conclusion.  Within a generation the monasteries had been dissolved, church-building had ceased, Lincoln spire had fallen, and medieval England had passed into history.  [p. 9]

Yet, for all the reasons above described, I have my suspicions that it is in Lincolnshire that the lost beauty he describes has lingered longest, and in particular in Lincolnshire’s towers that it survives most fiercely.  In a series of articles to come, I hope to describe what I found when I went to see some of them for myself.

St. Botolph’s church, Boston (the ‘Boston Stump’), under scaffolding on the 2nd February, 2019.  The tower is 266 feet high.

* Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy was used as the incidental music for John Betjeman’s 1964 BBC film Branch Line.
** One other Lincolnshire tower, that of the parish church of Deeping St Nicholas, photographed from the Peterborough-Spalding line on the 20th March 2014, illustrates the title banner of this blog.