Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/269

 *

street or road through the village. At Cawthorpe the water is always running and usually about six inches deep. The village lies in a hollow with curiously twisting little roads in it, and is very picturesque with its farms and trees and quaint little brick manor-house standing near the church at the three cross ways.

Rising from the hollow, the small byway runs with here and there beautiful trees and often on the right a tall hedge or narrow strip of plantation, reminding one of the roadside "shaws" in Hampshire, while on the left there is always a view down over cornfields and beyond the tops of the Tothill oak woods right across the fertile belt of the marsh to the shining line of the distant sea. With many a twist the byway runs on through Muckton village to Belleau, where it crosses the above-mentioned Swaby or Calceby beck and looks down on the picturesque church, standing in the grassy meadows, and on the brick turret and groined archways of the old Manor-house, and so on to South Thoresby, where the broken ground and the fine trees tell of an old mansion which stood there till last century; and past Rigsby, till it meets the Spilsby and Alford highway just below Miles-cross-Hill, whence it runs on through the avenue of elms to Well. And all the way, as it has run along the top of the eastern escarpment of the Wold, it has afforded us an outlook over a wide expanse of the marsh such as none of the other roads on the high wolds can equal. True, the Lincoln cliff road gives a finer view and runs further, but I don't think there is any prettier ten-mile stretch in the county than this 'Middle road' from Well to Louth.

At the entrance gate of Well Vale Hall the road divides, either route ending at Alford. Well Vale, a fine sporting estate and also a famous stronghold for foxes, the residence of Mr. Walter H. Rawnsley, is, I venture to think, the prettiest spot in the county. For a mile or more a grassy track descends from the top of Miles-Cross-Hill through a wooded valley where fine beeches stretch out their long arms, and pines and larch crown the chalky turf-clad sides, till the mouth of the Vale opens out into a park, whose rolling slopes are studded with handsome trees, and as you near the mansion, the front of which looks out across its brilliant flower-beds and quaint pinnacled gateway upon the little church flanked by branching