Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/463

 CHAPTER XXXVIII

SPALDING AND THE CHURCHES NORTH OF IT

Potato Trade—Bulb-growing—The Welland—Ayscough Fee Hall—The Gentleman's Society—The Church—Pinchbeck—Heraldic Tombs—The Custs—Surfleet—Leaning Tower—Gosberton—Churchyard Sheep—Cressy Hall—Quadring—Donington—Hemp and Flax—Swineshead—Bicker—Sutterton—Algarkirk.

Three main roads enter the town of Spalding, the last town on the Welland before it runs out into Fosdyke Wash. They come from the north, south, and east. The west has none, being one huge fen which, till comparatively recent times, admitted of locomotion only by boat. The southern road comes from Peterborough and enters the county by the bridge over the Welland at Market Deeping, a pleasant-looking little town with wide market-like streets and its four-armed sign-*post pointing to Peterborough and Spalding ten miles, and Bourne and Stamford seven miles.

From Deeping to Spalding the road is a typical fen road—three little inns and a few farm cottages and the occasional line of white smoke on the perfectly straight Peterborough and Boston railway is all there is to see save the crops or the long potato graves which are mostly by the road side.

The potato trade is a very large one. Every cart or waggon we passed at Easter-time on the roads between Deeping and Kirton-in-Holland was loaded with sacks of potatoes, and all the farm hands were busy uncovering the pits and sorting the tubers. Donington and Kirton seemed to be the centres of the trade, Kirton being the home of the man who is known as the potato king, and has many thousands of acres of fenland used for this crop alone. Spalding itself is the centre of the daffodil market, and quantities of bulbs are grown here and