Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/218

 evident that a good many Romans had villas on the high ground looking towards the Humber, for both here and at Roxby, a mile to the south, good Roman pavements have been found, and another, four miles to the east, at Horkstow. Roxby church shows some pre-Norman stone work at the west end of the north aisle, and a fine series of canopied sedilia in the chancel, with unusually rich and lofty pinnacles. At Winterton a Roman pavement was noticed by De la Pryme in 1699, and another with a figure of Ceres holding a cornucopia was discovered in 1797. The churchyard has an Early English cross, and the tower, which is engaged in the aisles, is of the primitive Romanesque type, with the Saxon belfry windows in the lower stage, and elegant Early English ones above. An early slab is over the west door, the nave has lofty octagonal pillars with bands of tooth ornament. The transepts are unusually wide and have rich Decorated windows. A Holy Family, by Raphael Mengs, forms the altarpiece.

From here we go west to Alkborough, and on a grassy headland overlooking the junction of the Trent with the Ouse, we find a saucer-shaped hollow a few feet deep and forty-four feet across, at the bottom of which is a maze cut in the turf by monks 800 years ago. It is almost identical in pattern with one at Wing, near Uppingham, in Rutland, and unlike those "quaint mazes on the wanton green" mentioned in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," which "for lack of tread are undistinguishable," it has been kept cleared out, and a copy of it laid down in the porch, as we find to be done on one of the porch piers at Lucca Cathedral, and in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. These mazes were Christian adaptations of the Egyptian and Greek labyrinths, and were supposed to be allegorical of the mazes and entanglements of sin from which man can only get free if assisted by the guiding hand of Providence, or of Holy Church. Hence in a Christian Basilica in Algeria the words "Sancta Ecclesia" are arranged in a complicated fashion in the centre of the maze. Other mazes used to exist at Appleby, Louth, and Horncastle in Lincolnshire, and at Ripon one of the same pattern, but half as large again as the Alkborough maze, was only ploughed up in 1827. At Asenby in Yorkshire is a similar one still carefully kept clear. That on St. Catherine's Hill, Winchester, is quadrangular and much simpler. At Leigh in Dorset is a "Miz Maze." Northants, Notts, Wilts, Beds,