Page:The Victoria History of the County of Lincoln Volume 2.pdf/283



INCOLNSHIRE, by the quaint conceit of a seventeenth-century eulogist, has been likened to a 'bended bow, the sea making the back, the rivers Welland and Humber the two horns thereof, while Trent hangeth down from the latter like a broken string, as being somewhat of the shortest.' The county would seem to have been built up, round its dominant capital, of natural divisions which are strongly contrasted in character and configuration, and their grouping to form the shire may be the outcome of a previous political connexion.

The three great divisions of the shire—the parts of Lindsey, Kesteven, and Holland—find some explanation when we try to create again natural conditions now passed away. In the Roman period, and long after, Lindsey might well be called an island. On three sides lay the sea, the Humber, the swamps of Axholme and the tidal Trent, while the Witham and broad shallow meres washed its southern base but for the neck of land at Lincoln Gap. And even over this the Trent swept in flood-time, till a bank was raised across the openings in the low sand-hills between Girton and Marton Cliff. Kesteven was mainly the forest region, a continuance of the undulating midland country, bordered on the north-east with a strip of fen, but including also the 'Cliff' range with its steep western slope betwixt Ancaster and Lincoln. In no part of the shire has there been so entire a change of its primaeval character as in Holland. There for league on league once stretched the fen—morass, peatmoor, and shallow meres with rank growth of reed and rush, and on the drier portions rich pasturage, deep sedge, or thickets of sweet gale, birch, and sallow. But the natural fen-land and the wild life it harboured are gone. The corn waves now where once lay a waste of waters, and so thoroughly has drainage done its work that in no part of England is drought more felt than in the fen region distant from the river's outfall.

The exact boundary between the parts of Kesteven and Holland was long a matter of dispute. At least as early as 1389 the attention of Parliament had been directed to the matter, and the ancient bounds ordered to be surveyed and marked again. A final decision was reached only in the second decade of the last century. Proceedings for the levy of a county rate had been delayed and finally suspended by the difficulty of ascertaining what proportion of the ancient inclosed lands called the Severals in Deeping Fen