Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/66

 many duck decoys marked in the 1828 map on each side of them till they come to the beginning of the great "Forty foot drain." The Glen then turning east resumes more or less its river character, joins the Welland and goes seawards to the Wash, while the Forty foot going northwards parallel to and with the same purpose as the "Carr Dyke" but a few miles to the east of that famous work, receives the water from the many "Droves" which are all cut east and west and conveys them to the outfall in Boston Haven.

We will now, without having to go outside the parallelogram of pleasant upland country which lies between the four towns of Stamford, Bourne, Sleaford and Grantham, find the sources of the river Witham and follow them through Grantham as far as Barkston and Marston, and thence through a totally different country to Lincoln. To begin at the beginning of things. Just at the junction of the three counties of Lincoln, Leicester, and Rutland, is a place near 'Crown point' called Cribbs Lodge. This commemorates the great boxing match between Molyneux, the black, and Tom Cribb, when, as the Stamford Mercury has it, "after a severe fight Molyneux was beat, and a reel was danced by Gully and Cribb amidst shouts of applause. There were 15,000 people present." Gully afterwards became an M.P.

Close to this spot, but in the county of Leicestershire, is the source of our river Witham, which takes its name from the little village of South Witham close by.

The infant stream skirts the western side of Witham Common, which is something like 400 feet above sea level; nearly all its feeders come from still higher ground just outside the western edge of the county. A glance at the map will show with what remarkable unanimity all the streams which feed the South Lincolnshire rivers flow eastwards. Thus from Witham Common a brook goes through Castle Bytham to join the Glen at Little Bytham. The castle, of which only huge mounds now remain, was perched on a hill and divided by the brook from the village which covers the slope of the valley and is crowned by its very early Norman church, making altogether a very pretty picture. The church contains a fine canopied tomb of the Colville family, who owned the castle in the thirteenth century, and also in the tower is a ladder eloquent of the Restoration, with the inscription "This ware the May Poul, 1660." Middleton, first Bishop of Calcutta, once held this living.