Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/338

 and now only a foot high. The reason of their existence is found in a bed of dark clay which underlies all this coast.

The only pot found has been a rough, hand-made jar with rolled edge and marks of the stick or bone with which the outside had been scraped and trimmed. Now, doubtless the Romans used the wheel. Moreover, these kilns are far outside the Roman bank, and not likely, therefore, to be for Roman use. Tree roots are found in the walls and inside the circle of the kilns, of the same sort as those of which at one time a perfect forest existed, the stumps of which are sometimes visible at low tide. At the time the Romans made their sea bank the sea must have come right over this forest, so that we may perhaps say that those thumb-bricks bear the impress of the fingers of the earliest inhabitants of Britain, and are therefore of extraordinary interest.

On the eastern side of South Lindsey the running out of the roads, from Burgh and Wainfleet, to the coast always seemed to point to the existence of some Roman terminus near Skegness. Some years after he had noted this as probable, the Rev. E. H. R. Tatham, who has made a study of Roman roads in Lincolnshire, discovered that in the court rolls of the manor of Ingoldmells, the mention is made of a piece of land called indifferently in a document dated 1345, "Chesterland," or "Castelland"; and again in 1422, four acres of land in "Chesterland" are mentioned as being surrendered by one William Skalflete (Court Rolls, p. 248), this land is never mentioned again, and the presumption is that it was swallowed by the sea. And in 1540 Leland mentions a statement made to him, that Skegness once had a haven town with a "castle," but that these had been "clene consumed and eaten up with the se."

These terms "Chester" and "caster" point to a Roman fort or "castrum," and the fact that the names "Chesterland" and "Castelland" exist in medieval documents dealing with the land in the immediate neighbourhood seems to go a long way towards confirming Mr. Tatham's conjecture of the existence of a Roman fort near Skegness, over which the sea has now encroached.

From Skegness we will now turn inland, and after about four miles reach Croft (All Saints) by a road which keeps turning at right angles and only by slow degrees brings a traveller perceptibly nearer to the clump of big, shady trees