The Oldest Features in The Deepings: Part One

St Guthlac's Church. Author's image.

I started to look into the oldest buildings and features in The Deepings some time ago but found myself struggling with illness and then engaged in other projects. I told myself it wasn't a big job and if I put my mind to it, I could easily prepare something for the Easter weekend - how wrong I was! The task of sifting through the reams of listed buildings and features has proved quite onerous at times and I was quite fed up with typing 'squared limestone' and 'Collyweston' in my notes. However, I have a new found respect for the history of The Deepings and now have to stop myself from travelling through the area and pointing at every building and shouting its date as I go!

Today's blogpost covers the oldest features in the area that can be seen (and theoretically touched - but I'm not recommending it) and include buildings and parts of the landscape. So which is the oldest?

Using the Lincolnshire Heritage Explorer website it is possible to view all of the archaeological features in the area of the Deepings, which is a brilliant resource for any endeavour such as this (see the link below). What I've been looking for are features still easily visible in the landscape, which rules out a large quantity of the crop marks visible on dry summer days from a plane or aerial photos. There are lots of Roman, Iron Age and Bronze Age features - some of the new housing estates in Market Deeping have been built on top of complex Roman and Iron Age features - but they are entirely or primarily hidden. However, there are a few worth mentioning. 

The most famous two are the ones I alluded to in an earlier post: Godsey Lane follows the route of Roman Car Dyke, continuing as a dyke to the north of Towngate East; Roman King Street runs north-south through West Deeping. What also need a mention are the two late Neolithic and early Bronze Age barrow cemeteries: one is just north of the Deeping bypass; the other is on Littleworth Drove, and they are part of the same landscape. I'm not naming the exact locations because these mounds are on private land and by people's homes - a gentle reminder, if needed, to respect people's space and property and not to go searching for prehistoric features in person.

There are another couple of mounds dating to the middle Iron Age and Roman period south of Towngate East. The mounds show up beautifully on lidar images (see the Bluesky Mapshop link below) and are part of a saltern (used to extract salt from the brackish water, which tells you a lot about the landscape) and a settlement.

Moving on from the landscape features, we've got our stone-based features. If you've read the post on Peterborough's oldest buildings, you're probably expecting a church, but you would be wrong. In contrast to the Peterborough buildings post I've also included features, which includes objects. The oldest features, therefore, are a Saxon grave cover sitting in the porch of St Guthlac's Church and part of a cross shaft in the chancel. They are dated to the late 10th or early 11th century and are in incredible condition for their age.

The Saxon fragment in the porch of St Guthlac. Author's image.

St Guthlac's isn't the oldest building, however, that award goes to the church at Deeping St James. Formerly a Benedictine priory, it was part of the wider Thorney Abbey portfolio and the settlement was known as East Deeping. The church is dated to 1139 but has, like all popular churches, had many additions and improvements over the years. The Saxon objects at St Guthlac's (a Saxon name) do provide evidence that there was a religious building - said to be a chapel - on the site before the current church and suggest that the prize should go to that site, but of course the Saxon building is no longer standing (for evidence of Saxon features in churches you need to head to Peterborough and my earlier post). The high banks that first helped to stop the river flooding the low land in the Deepings were also first created around 1,000 years ago (and should themselves be recognised as an important historical feature*) which allowed the ground to dry out and churches to be built.

St Guthlac's is dated to the late 12th century, with St Andrew's in West Deeping dated to the early 13th century. But St Andrew's is eclipsed in age by a rather curious feature practically hidden in the fields of northern Peterborough. Kenulph's Stone is the remains of a stone cross thought to date to around 1200. It marks the location where the north of Peterborough butts up against South Kesteven and South Holland. You might be thinking to yourself that surely it belongs in The Welland, for that is the boundary between Peterborough and Lincolnshire and you would be partly right. The cross was described as being in the water in the past (likely the surrounding bog rather than the actual Welland) and has been moved over time, but so has the river and banks, and there has been more than one argument over the siting of the cross. It gained an additional stone - a top - in 1819, which gives a little more height and gravitas to the cross, as have the other crosses in The Deepings.

Towngate Cross. Image by the Milepost Society via Geograph

Towngate Cross base also features in this list, the base dating to the 14th century. It too has an additional stone top which gives it the look of a stone traffic cone! It sits at the cross roads between Halfleet and Towngate and I guarantee that thousands of people travel past it everyday completely unaware that they're passing by an object that's been sat there for over 600 years.

There is another cross at Deeping St James and this is both the most impressive, but the most changed. Dating to the 15th century, the cross was made of beautiful carved stone, quite unlike any of the other local crosses. In 1819 (recognise that date?!) it was converted into a lock up, which is its current form. The old cross forms the top of the lockup, with a newer square stone room below it to hold criminals. 

The Lock Up at Deeping St James. Image by Rex Needle via Geograph

All of these buildings and features are designated scheduled monuments and/or Grade I listed buildings with the exception of the Saxon features which are named in the St Guthlac's listing and identified as monuments on the Lincolnshire Heritage Explorer website. Everything except the prehistoric features are worth a visit, and it's easy to visit two or three with a short walk, or all of them in one day if you're up for the challenge!

To recap:

• the oldest features are the Neolithic and Bronze Age barrow cemeteries
• the oldest building is the Church of St James in Deeping St James
• the oldest objects are the Saxon grave cover and cross in St Guthlac's church.

If you want to look into the records then head to the Lincolnshire Historic Environment Record at https://heritage-explorer.lincolnshire.gov.uk/map

If you want to explore the landscape using lidar and aerial photos then Bluesky Mapshop is the place to look https://www.blueskymapshop.com/maps/ 

If you want to explore the list of listed buildings in the area then the British Listed Buildings website is a good start https://britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/

For more information on Kenulph's Stone then this blogpost by Deepings Heritage is great https://deepingsheritage.wordpress.com/tag/kennulphs-stone/

*I appreciate they will have been adapted and even moved over the years, but so have the roads and dykes.

The Deeping Fen Waterspout

In my last blog I briefly mentioned the great bog that was Deeping Fen, so it felt important to explain a little more about it and highlight an unusual event.

Deeping Fen was, as Stukeley had observed, largely a bog and at times a lake. Even in more recent times, the central part of the area was commonly referred to as a lake and was mostly unusable land.

The Deeping fen area stretches from the rivers Glen to the north and Welland to the south, an area of vast flatness with no observable feature that was not manmade. Several towns and villages exist on the periphery of the fen with strong Anglo-Saxon roots, and Roman Car Dyke flirts with the western edge of the fen. There are also some excellent archaeological features from prehistory, so the land was never ‘just a swamp’.

Drainage began centuries ago, and the enormous hand-cut drains still dominate the landscape today. They remain vital in protecting the low-lying land from summer deluges and winter’s constant rains. Almost as vital as the deeply dug river channels of the Welland and Glen whose wide and enormously high banks have happily contained a vast quantity of water without incident for many years. However, in took centuries to drain the fen until it was suitably habitable.

It was thanks to this frequent dampness that Deeping Fen was the site of an unusual weather feature in 1752. The journal Fenland Notes and Queries carried an account from Reverend Benjamin Ray, the Perpetual Curate of Cowbit and Surfleet, who had seen a waterspout over Deeping Fen. Rev. Ray is described in Literary Anecdotes related to the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society as being ‘A most ingenious and worthy man, possessed of good learning, but ignorant of the world; indolent and thoughtless, and very often absent.’ Hardly a glowing report and perhaps not the most reliable reporter of a rare meteorological sighting. The report was as follows:

May 5^th 1752, a phenomenon appeared about 7 in the evening, in Deeping-Fen, which, from its effects, seemed to be a water-spout, broken from the clouds. A watery substance, as it seemed, was seen moving on the earth and water, in Deeping-Fen. It passed along with such violence and rapidity, that it carried every thing before it: such as grass, straw, and stubble; and in going over the country bank, it raised the dust to a great height; and when it arrived in the wash, in the midst of the water, and just over against where Mr R. lived, it stood still for some minutes. This watery substance spouted out water from its own surface to a considerable height, and with a terrible noise.

The waterspout continued to Cowbit and then headed towards Weston Hills and Moulton Chapel, destroying a field of turnips, and damaging two gates on its progress. Others were also seen on the same day, but none of them would have benefitted from the specific landscape credentials of Deeping Fen.

The journal Fenland Notes and Queries can be viewed online, as can Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. Follow the links below.

https://archive.org/details/fenlandnotesque01sweegoog/page/n272/mode/2up

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Literary_Anecdotes_Of_The_Eighteenth_Cen/-UxjAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

Image of a sheep on the high bank of the River Welland by the author