Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/336

 if any other church has such a wealth of old carved woodwork as Addlethorpe or Winthorpe. There is, cut on the south-east angle of Winthorpe tower, a deep horizontal line with the letters "H.W. 1837." This indicates the level of high-water mark on the other side of the sea bank, and as the mark on the tower is eight feet nine inches from the ground, though the 1837 tide was an exceptionally high one, it gives some idea of what this part of the Marsh must at times have been in the days before the Romans made their great embankment. A plan for improving the drainage of the land at Winthorpe was made as early as 1367, and a rate was exacted of 1s. an acre.

Skegness, now, next to Cleethorpes, the best known and most frequented by excursion "trippers" of all the east coast places, used to be fifty years ago only a little settlement of fishermen who lived in cabins built on the strip of ground between the road and the ditches on each side. A lifeboat shed and an old sea-boat set up on its gunwale for a shelter, with a seat in it, and a flagstaff close by, used chiefly for signalling to a collier to come in, were on the sea bank. Behind it was an hotel, and one thatched house just inside the Roman bank, built by Mr. Edward Walls about 1780. This was cleverly contrived so that not an inch of space was wasted anywhere. It was only one room thick, so that from the same room you could see the sun rise over the sea and set over the Marsh. It was here that Tennyson saw those "wide-winged sunsets of the misty marsh" that he speaks of in "The Last Tournament," and took delight in their marvellous colouring.

The house rose up from the level behind and below the bank, and the back door was on the ground floor, with a porch and hinged leaves to shut out the terrific wind from N. and E. or N. and W. as required, but on the sea front, access was obtained by a removable plank bridge from the bank top which landed you on the first floor. Here was the summer home of all our family—a children's paradise—when you ran straight out bare-foot on to the sandy bank and so across the beautiful hard sands and through the salt-water creeks down to the sea. This at high water was close at hand with tumbling waves and seething waters, but at low tide, far as eye could reach was nothing but sand, with the fisherman's pony and cart, and his donkey and boy at the other end of