Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/405

 small brasses in the church to James Prescott and his wife, who was a Molineux of Lancashire. They died in 1581 and 1583. In 1636 Sir W. Prescott sold the manor of Driby to Sir John Bolles, and in 1715 it was bought by Burrell Massingberd and still goes with the Ormsby estate of that family.

A few words must be added about Tattershall. The great brick building which rises so magnificently out of the flat is one of the most impressive things in this or any country. I have walked all day partridge shooting on the estate, and however far you went you never seemed able to get away from the immediate presence of the magnificent pile; you only had to look round and it was apparently just at your shoulder all day long. Then if you enter it and go up, for even the first floor is several feet above the level of the quadrangle, you are astonished at the size of the great chambers one above the other, thirty-eight feet by twenty-two, and seventeen feet high; and finally you come on the second, third, and fourth story to the most beautiful brick vaulting and mouldings in the small rooms and galleries running round the big central rooms in the thickness of the walls. The whole is of exquisite workmanship, and finished by very deep and handsome machicolations and battlements. The bricks are apparently Flemish, thinner and of finer quality than the English bricks; similar ones were used in building Halstead Hall, Stixwould. The windows are dressed with stone, these are large and arched, having mullions and the heads filled with stone tracery like church windows. This shows how the nobleman's castle was changing into the nobleman's palace or mansion. The building is at one corner of a quadrangle, and is itself a parallelogram, and, including the turret bases, eighty-seven feet long by sixty-nine wide, and 112 feet high to the parapet of the angle turret. The walls, which are built on massive brick vaulting, are immensely thick, being fifteen feet above, and even more on the ground floor. The windows of the basement chambers are close on the water of the moat, for several small chambers were made in the thickness of the walls, in which, too, are the four chimneys. The spiral staircase is in the south-east turret, and has a continuous stone handrail let into the brick wall, very cleverly contrived, and giving a firm and easy grasp. Each turret is octagonal, going up all the way from the ground and being finished with a cone. In each turret is a fireplace—a comfort