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LAND ON
THE EDGE
HEADLINE STORIES
CAITLIN R. GREEN
2023
Historic England project number: 8398
Louth, Lincolnshire
© Caitlin R. Green 2023
The right of Caitlin R. Green to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Sections 77 and 78.
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence, see
further https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.ast
Contents
1 Mapping the Marsh: A Lost Landscape of Islands and Creeks .................................................... 1
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 1
Maps and the hidden landscape ..................................................................................................................... 1
Reconstructing the creeks and rivers of the former coastal marshes ...................................................... 2
Analysing the lost landscapes of the Lincolnshire coastal zone ............................................................... 3
2 Discovering Western Doggerland: The Drowned Landscape and Submerged Forest of the
Lincolnshire Coastline ................................................................................................................ 5
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 5
The drowning of Western Doggerland and the emergence of the Lincolnshire coastline .................. 5
The submerged forests of the Lincolnshire coast ....................................................................................... 7
Where to visit .................................................................................................................................................... 8
3 Romans, Saxons and Vikings: The Settlement and Reclamation of the Lincolnshire Coastal
Marshes ....................................................................................................................................... 9
Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 9
Settlement and salt-making in the Romano-British marshes .................................................................... 9
The Late/post-Roman marine transgression and Anglo-Saxon activity in the marshes .................... 10
The Lincolnshire coastal marshes in the Viking era and afterwards ...................................................... 11
4 Salt and Creeks in the Lincolnshire Coastal Zone: Making a Living in the Marsh .................... 13
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 13
The earliest salt-making on the Lincolnshire coastline ............................................................................ 13
The ‘new way’ of making salt: the medieval saltern mounds of the Lincolnshire coast ..................... 14
Conclusion....................................................................................................................................................... 16
5 The Medieval Ports and Havens of the Lincolnshire Coastline ................................................. 17
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 17
Boston .............................................................................................................................................................. 17
Toft, Leake, Wrangle and Friskney Havens ............................................................................................... 17
Wainfleet .......................................................................................................................................................... 18
Skegness ........................................................................................................................................................... 18
Ingoldmells and Schalflet .............................................................................................................................. 19
Wilgrip (Theddlethorpe) ............................................................................................................................... 19
Saltfleethaven .................................................................................................................................................. 19
Mar (Somercotes), Swine (Grainthorpe) and Northcotes havens .......................................................... 20
Grimsby ........................................................................................................................................................... 20
6 The Lost Islands of the Lincolnshire Marsh and Coast.............................................................. 21
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 21
The offshore barrier islands ......................................................................................................................... 21
The clay islands of the medieval marsh ...................................................................................................... 21
Islands of sand on the Lincolnshire coast .................................................................................................. 23
Islands of salt .................................................................................................................................................. 24
7 The Drowned Towns and Villages of the Lincolnshire Coastline ............................................. 25
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 25
Mablethorpe St Peter ..................................................................................................................................... 25
Old Skegness ................................................................................................................................................... 26
Sutton on Sea .................................................................................................................................................. 26
Chapel St Leonards ........................................................................................................................................ 27
Later flooding and erosion ........................................................................................................................... 27
8 Towns and Trade on the Lincolnshire Coast ............................................................................. 29
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 29
The earliest towns and trading centres of the Lincolnshire coast .......................................................... 29
Bathing inns, railways and new towns ........................................................................................................ 31
Towns that never came to pass .................................................................................................................... 32
9 Wrecks and Wreckers on the Lincolnshire Coast ...................................................................... 33
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 33
Wrecks, wreckers and the ‘right of wreck’ on the Lincolnshire coast ................................................... 33
Saving lives on the Lincolnshire coast ........................................................................................................ 34
The afterlife of vessels on the beach ........................................................................................................... 36
10 Pirates and Smugglers on the Lincolnshire Coast.................................................................... 37
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 37
Lookouts and fortresses: protecting the Lincolnshire coast in the Viking age .................................... 37
Medieval piracy and the ‘pirate island’ of Ravenserodd ........................................................................... 38
Pirates of the Elizabethan age and after ..................................................................................................... 38
The smugglers of the Lincolnshire coast.................................................................................................... 40
11 Fortress Lincolnshire? Landscapes of Defence and Warning on the Lincolnshire Coast ........ 41
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 41
Roman defences ............................................................................................................................................. 41
Anglo-Saxon and Viking defence ................................................................................................................ 41
Castles and beacons in the medieval and post-medieval periods ........................................................... 42
The First and Second World Wars .............................................................................................................. 43
12 Inns on the Edge and the Landscape of the Lincolnshire Coast ............................................. 45
Introduction .................................................................................................................................................... 45
Reflecting the landscape: ports and the earliest ‘Inns on the Edge’ ...................................................... 45
Creating the landscape: bathing inns and the origins of the resort coastline ....................................... 46
Acknowledgements
I should like to acknowledge the following debts to the various people and organisations who have enabled
this research to be completed. In the first place, thanks are due to Historic England for the funding of this
project and to Sarah Grundy and Ian George of Lincolnshire County Council for commissioning this study
and managing the wider Inns on the Edge project of which this is a part. I likewise owe debts of thanks to a
large variety of organisation who have kindly provided materials during the preparation of this work. The
underlying mapping of the creek and island systems of the Lincolnshire coastal zone depends ultimately on
the Lidar data provided under the Open Government Licence by the Environment Agency, which is
© Environment Agency 2021; the resultant mapping consequently contains public sector information
licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0, as do the Lidar images included in this work. The other
component of many of the maps produced for this work is the OS Six Inch maps from the 1900s, which
have been used as a base-layer for transcribing the Lidar data, as discussed in Section 2 of the main report:
this has been kindly provided to this project by the National Library of Scotland and its third-party digitizer
and is reproduced with their permission. Other sources of information are acknowledged in the captions
to the relevant images, but the following have been of particular use: Captain Andrew Armstrong’s large-
scale Map of Lincolnshire of 1779, British Library Maps K.Top.19.19.5 tab.end, which is
© The British Library Board and used by their kind permission; Bryant’s 1828 Map of Lincolnshire and
Greenwood’s 1830 Map of Lincolnshire, which were kindly provided for this project by Daniel Crouch Rare
Books; modern mapping of eastern Lincolnshire, made available by OpenStreetMap, which is
© OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Data Commons Open Database License 1.0
(www.openstreetmap.org/copyright); images of artefacts made available by the Portable Antiquities
Scheme, which are provided under CC BY-SA 4.0 and CC BY 2.0 licences; and Google Earth images
provided by Google and its partners, which are used and attributed in the image caption as per Google
Earth’s Terms of Service and attribution guidance (as of 2021 and 2022).
In addition to the above, I also need to express my thanks to Paul Cope-Faulkner of Archaeological
Project Services for allowing me to use a processed greyscale plot of a magnetic gradiometer survey
undertaken by Archaeological Project Services as fig. 1.4a; to Jacob Field for sharing his transcription of
the Lincolnshire coastal zone sections of the Spare Beds and Stabling Survey of 1686 (TNA WO 30/48)
with me; to Professor T. Spencer, of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography, for
allowing me to use a historic aerial photograph as fig. 20 of the main report, which is reproduced with
permission of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography © Copyright reserved; to Jan
Allen for helping me access the materials produced for the Viking Link and Triton Knoll projects, and to
Mark Allen of Allen Archaeology for providing me with copies of their Triton Knoll materials, Candy
Hatherley of Headland Archaeology for sending me their Triton Knoll materials, and Ruben Lopez Catalan
of Network Archaeology for sharing their Viking Link project data; to Rachael Hall and Rosalind Buck of
the National Trust for providing me with the archaeological and geoarchaeological assessment relating to
NT Sandilands; to Katherine Selby for providing me with a copy of her and Sally Derrett’s report on the
Lincolnshire Coast Submerged Landscape; to Ian Simmons for allowing me to see a pre-publication copy
of his book Fen and Sea: The Landscapes of South-East Lincolnshire AD 500–1700 (Oxford, 2022) and for several
thought-provoking discussions of the landscape history of the south-eastern portion of the study zone; to
Ian Shennan for sharing some of his underlying work preparatory to the palaeogeographic maps he has
published of the region with me, which helped considerably; to Helen Fenwick for sending me materials
that were proving hard to source; and to Richard Watts of the Lincolnshire HER for answering my many
queries and providing the large number of grey literature reports that needed to be consulted for this project.
Finally, it ought to be noted that photographs and postcards that appear without further attribution in this
work are either images taken by the author or scans of early twentieth-century postcards from the author’s
own collection.
1
1 Mapping the Marsh: A Lost Landscape of Islands and Creeks
Introduction
The coastline of Lincolnshire has changed dramatically and repeatedly, and one of the key aims of the Land
on the Edge project has been to understand this dynamic evolution. The current Lincolnshire coastline of
dunes and resort towns is relatively recent in origin, being located on the seaward edge of a flat, wide plain
of agricultural land around 5–10km wide that is known as the Outmarsh. This stretches from Humberston,
south of Cleethorpes, all the way down to Skegness and Wainfleet and mainly lies around 1.5-2.5m above
sea-level, with a similar plain forming the Low Grounds from Wainfleet to Boston. This area was originally
all coastal saltmarshes, sandbanks and mudflats, and still lies well below the maximum level of spring tides
on the Lincolnshire coast. The process by which this landscape was won back from the sea, and then in
part lost to it once more, is an important question. To understand this, we need to know what this landscape
looked like before it was dewatered and given over to agriculture and later tourism.
Maps and the hidden
landscape
In order to analyse this region,
we need detailed maps of it.
Modern Ordnance Survey and
British Geological Society maps
give a general idea of its
character. These show that it
much of consists of a flat plain of
marine alluvium studded by
occasional low hillocks that
usually reach between 3m and
9m above sea-level at their
summits. These hillocks or minor
rises would originally have been
low, dry islands in a wide coastal
zone, but identifying just how
many there were of these islands
is difficult. Furthermore, current
maps give no real indication of
what was present in the rest of
the coastal zone away from these
islands prior to the modern era.
A key tool in aiding our
understanding of both these
questions is Lidar. Lidar, or
airborne laser scanning (ALS),
produces detailed and reliable
topographic maps that have a
high degree of accuracy, allowing
us to observe extremely minor
variations in the height of the land. Using this tool, we can see that the former islands in the area around
Chapel St Leonards are more numerous and extensive than the BGS maps indicate and that they spread
further too, down into the Addlethorpe area, with others present near Boston too. Even more importantly,
the Lidar also shows that the Lincolnshire coastal zone was once criss-crossed by a dense network of creeks
and estuarine rivers, some hundreds of metres wide or more, both in the Wash area and also on the
Lincolnshire Marsh from Humberston down to Wainfleet.
Figure 1.1: Lidar image of the entire study area. Land in blue is all below about 2.5m
OD, with land in dark blue being located close to or below sea-level; land in green
lies up to about 5m OD, whilst land in yellow and brown is above 5m OD. The
grey represents the 3m contour inland of the project area (contains Lidar data ©
Environment Agency 2021, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0).
2
Reconstructing the creeks and rivers of the
former coastal marshes
The lost creeks and estuarine rivers of the Lincolnshire
coast are visible on a normal Lidar plot of this landscape
as slight changes in colour indicative of small, but locally
significant, variations in height compared to the
surrounding former marshes. These variations
represent raised ‘roddons’, that is silt- and sand-filled
former channels that now stand higher than the
surrounding land—due in part to this suffering from
compaction and shrinking under drainage, especially in
areas where there was formerly considerable amounts
of peat—and down-cut channels. These creeks and
rivers weave across the landscape and often have
dendritic offshoots. Plotting them can be a complex
task, although the pattern can be brought out
considerably by altering the colour scale of the Lidar
plot so that it only looks at a restricted range of heights.
For this project, the Lidar evidence for these
watercourses was combined with a complete survey of
all the coastal borehole records from Boston through to
Figure 1.2: A Lidar rendering of an area of the Lincolnshire coastal zone, focussing on the East Fen and Wash coastline and
adjusted to show some of the overlapping generations of dendritic roddons here. The large channels in the darker zone are
prehistoric marine roddons that were buried under the peats of the East Fen until this was drained and reclaimed (contains Lidar
data © Environment Agency 2021, licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0).
Figure 1.3: Aerial photo of the Ashington to Sloothby area
depicting a major roddon, 60m or more wide, and its tributaries,
with a darker, central ‘final channel’ clearly visible (Google Earth
image from 2021, Google © 2022, Image © 2022 CNES/Airbus).
3
Grimsby, aerial photography of the whole
coastal region, and 19th-century and earlier
mapping. The geological material suggests
that some of the visible lost creeks and rivers
had their origins back in the prehistoric era,
perhaps even before the flooding of the
Lincolnshire coast around 6000 BC, and were
a persistent feature of the landscape here. In
contrast, the aerial photography and early
mapping can be used to confirm and
supplement the channels identified via Lidar.
Aerial photographs taken in the right
conditions are able to show very small
dendritic saltmarsh channels, as well as filling
in gaps where modern development obscures
the Lidar if they date from before this
development. Older maps can likewise help
with this, especially in those areas where the
lines of creeks are clearly preserved in field
and parish boundaries.
Analysing the lost landscapes of the
Lincolnshire coastal zone
The maps that have been produced as a result
of this work offer a much richer view of
Lincolnshire’s dynamic coastal zone and
enable detailed landscape history questions to be asked. When combined with archaeological and historical
data, it becomes clear that whilst much earlier settlement tended to focus on the islands in the marsh,
roddons, sand banks and the waste-mounds from the medieval salt-processing industry were also key
elements in the landscape just as they were in the southern Lincolnshire Fenland, with settlements being
built around and atop. Furthermore, by combining this material together, we can also begin to ask questions
Figure 1.4: (a) A plot of a magnetic gradiometer survey undertaken by Archaeological Project Services at Orby, which shows the
southernmost part of the major roddon seen in fig. 3, helping confirm its scale and reality (Archaeological Project Services). (b)
Section from the 1824 OS old series map, showing the extensive Burgh Common/‘Common of Scalflete’ that preserved the line
of an even larger channel into which the Orby roddon drained (Ordnance Survey, 1824/Wikimedia Commons).
Figure 1.5: Map of the Lincolnshire coastal zone showing the
channels identified in this study (Underlying modern mapping for
this and Fig. 1.1 is © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under
the Open Database Licence)
4
about how the landscape would have looked and evolved in different eras. So, between Boston and
Wainfleet we seem to have multiple overlapping generations of creeks, some orientated East–West and
others North–South, many of which are thought to be prehistoric in origin, whilst on the Outmarsh there
is much less evidence for overlapping systems. Moreover, in some areas, the creek systems seem to have at
least partially continued to be active well into the medieval period—in the Skegness area, for example, the
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century field boundaries seem to follow the line of these creeks, whilst all
along the coastline the mouths of these creeks seem to have formed the prosperous medieval ports and
havens of Lincolnshire, like those of Saltfleet, Northcotes, Wainfleet, Wrangle and Wilgrip.
Figure 1.6: Reconstruction of the channel systems in place in the southern Lincolnshire Marsh, based on Lidar data, aerial
photographs and other sources, set against a map of the fields in early twentieth century Lincolnshire (National Library of
Scotland). Note, creeks and estuarine rivers are shown in dark blue, land below c. 2.5m OD in light blue, land between c. 2.5m
and 3m OD in light green, land from c.3m to 5m OD in green, and land over c. 5m OD in dark green.
5
2 Discovering Western Doggerland: The Drowned Landscape
and Submerged Forest of the Lincolnshire Coastline
Introduction
The present-day Lincolnshire Outmarsh is a flat
landscape of reclaimed marine alluvium broken up by
occasional minor ‘hills’ that seldom rise above 8m OD
or so. Many of these ‘hills’ are natural mounds of clay
and gravel deposited at the end of the last Ice Age
(c. 29,000–14,700 years ago) that protrude through the
flat alluvial plain, the last remnants of a rolling,
undulating prehistoric landscape here that was flooded
by the sea from around 8,000 years ago through to the
medieval period. This landscape was laid down by the
melting glaciers on top of a flat wave-cut chalk
platform that had been created when high sea-levels
about 125,000 years ago eroded away the Lincolnshire
Wolds. As the glaciers melted, sea-levels rose by over
120m, gradually transforming eastern Lincolnshire
from an upland, forest-covered zone sitting above the
great lowland plain of Doggerland (now the bottom of
the North Sea) into, first, a gradually flooding
landscape of shallow valleys and hills, and then a wide,
flat landscape of low islands, creeks and coastal
marshes that largely lay below the level of the highest
tides.
The drowning of Western Doggerland and
the emergence of the Lincolnshire coastline
In order to understand the process by which the post-
glacial landscape was transformed from one of clay
hills and valleys into that of the modern flat alluvial
plain, an analysis was undertaken using all accessible
Figure 2.1: The evolution of the Lincolnshire coast during
the past half a million years, based on a borehole survey
from Louth to North Somercotes (Source: C. R. Green)
Figure 2.2: The start of the flooding of Doggerland
(Source: J. Walker et al, ‘A great wave: the Storegga tsunami
and the end of Doggerland?’, Antiquity 94 (2020), 1409–25,
fig. 2, made available under a CC BY licence).
6
geological data recorded between Boston and Grimsby, including borehole and auger records,
archaeological excavations, 19th-century brick-pit records, and the various previous reconstructions of the
underlying landscape that have been attempted. This allowed a model of the prehistoric landscape prior to
its flooding to be created and the gradual inundation of the Outmarsh to be mapped in greater detail than
has been previously attempted. Some areas are naturally better recorded than others, and so the model has
Figure 2.3: The flooding of the Lincolnshire Marsh, with the modern coastline and towns marked: dark blue areas are suggested
to be under water most of the time; light blue areas are probably below spring-tide level; light green indicates land around 2.5–5m
above sea-level (Underlying modern mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence).
7
greater certainty in those areas, but even allowing for this, it does give us an intriguing idea of how the
Lincolnshire coastal zone would have changed over time prior to the flooding reaching its highest level
around 1,500 years ago or so. When combined with previous models of how the offshore portions of
Doggerland originally looked, we can create palaeogeographic maps of the process, as seen in the images
presented here.
Thes maps show how this landscape flooded over time from the start of the Early Mesolithic, around
6500 BC, through to the Late Bronze Age (c. 1000 BC). As can be seen, the flooding was initially relatively
rapid, but slowed in pace after this. Britain’s land-bridge to the Continent via Doggerland was severed
sometime around 7000 BC according to recent studies and the coastline moved inexorably westwards after
this, with the sea reaching parts of the modern Lincolnshire coastline by around 6500–6000 BC. By the
Early Neolithic, much of the modern Outmarsh was flooded almost as far inland as it was in the early
medieval period. Furthermore, the hills to the east of the current coast became a string of barrier islands
that are believed to have protected the Lincolnshire coast, creating calmer conditions and allowing the wide
saltmarshes and sand flats to develop. By about 1000 BC the coastal zone had largely stabilised, although
there were periods in which the sea receded slightly, and the easternmost edge of the saltmarshes in 1000 BC
is probably located in roughly the same area as it was in the medieval period, prior to its erosion from
Mablethorpe down to Skegness after the 13th century, when storms destroyed the barrier islands.
The submerged forests of the
Lincolnshire coast
Aside from the glacial islands—like those
on which Huttoft and Cumberworth are
situated—the most obvious remnants of
this drowned landscape of ‘Western
Doggerland’ can been seen along the
Lincolnshire coast. Here the waterlogged
remnants of the great Mesolithic to
Neolithic forests that once covered the
hummocky landscape are exposed at low
tides or thrown up by the sea after storms.
At sites like Wolla Bank, near the North
Sea Observatory at Chapel St Leonards, the
lowest tides expose the eroded fragments of
the old land surface, with fallen trees,
branches and stumps lying in a thin peat
that formed over the ancient soil as the
rising tides waterlogged the forest. Analysis
suggests that the forest at Wolla Bank was a
mixed deciduous woodland that
transitioned to alder carr and then oak
woodland as water levels rose, before the
land was finally submerged in the Neolithic
period, around 5,200 years ago.
The presence of a submerged forest all
along the eastern Lincolnshire coast from
Ingoldmells to Mablethorpe, with other
exposures found further north at Cleethorpes, has intrigued visitors to this coastline for hundreds of years.
One of the earliest accounts of it comes from 1796, when the Portuguese abbot and scientist Joseph Correa
de Serra was taken to see the forest at Sutton-on-Sea by Sir Joseph Banks of Revesby. Visible only at the
Figure 2.4: Map of the Lincolnshire Outmarsh area, showing where
buried forests (red) and peats (yellow) from the initial inundation have
been found; stars are recorded coastal exposures of these (open where
not currently visible), dots are inland finds, and the yellow line denotes
the coast where peat is often found (Modern map © OpenStreetMap
contributors, Open Database Licence).
8
lowest tides, he records that a
‘submarine forest’ of birch, fir and oak
was preserved atop clay islands that
‘extend at least twelve miles in length,
and about a mile in breadth, opposite
to Sutton shore’. Unfortunately, these
easily accessible coastal fragments of
the pre-flood landscape of the
Lincolnshire coast are increasingly
under threat. When first reported, the
outcrops were huge. However, by the
1920s, their width had declined to
only about 135 metres, and by the
1990s to only 45 metres. Nowadays,
only a few small sections of ancient
land surface are exposed by the lowest
tides—during an exceptionally low
tide at Trusthorpe in 2018, only two
lone stumps appeared above the sea, a vast change from previously recorded experiences! This can be in
part explained by recent beach replenishment works covering up some of the forest deposits and recent
increases in mean sea-level, but it is likely that erosion over time also plays a very significant role, particularly
as a significant amount of decline was noted prior to the modern beach replenishment works.
Where to visit
Wolla Bank and Anderby Creek—The lowest tides expose the in-situ eroded fragments of the old land
surface, with fallen trees, branches and stumps lying in a thin peat that formed over the ancient soil as the
rising tides waterlogged the forest. Analysis suggests that the forest here was a mixed deciduous woodland
that was finally submerged in the Neolithic period, around 5,000 years ago or so.
Cleethorpes—The remains of a slightly more recent, Late Neolithic forest dated to around 4,500 years ago
can be encountered on Cleethorpes beach just the north of the railway station at most normal low tides.
There are a variety of large fallen tree trunks along with stumps, roots, and a possible Bronze Age timber
trackway. Some of the trees may even have signs of human working, and flint blades and a hafted Bronze
Age axe have been found here.
Figure 2.5: A tree trunk from the Late Neolithic forest exposed on the sea-
front at Cleethorpes (C. R. Green).
Figure 2.6: The Neolithic submerged forest outcrop at Wolla Bank, Lincolnshire, and a branch embedded in it (C. R. Green).
9
3 Romans, Saxons and Vikings: The Settlement and Reclamation
of the Lincolnshire Coastal Marshes
Introduction
The Lincolnshire coastal zone saw flooding by the
sea from around 6000 BC onwards, completely
changing the landscape and character of this
region. Nevertheless, alongside the floods that
created an enduring wide, flat expanse of
saltmarshes, islands, creeks and estuarine rivers
here, there were also periods of marine regression,
when the marshes either dried out in part or were
overlain by freshwater peats. These periods
occurred at a variety of times and in a range of
places, with some lasting longer than others. For
example, the vast expanse of the East Fen resulted
from one of these periods, with this peat fen then
persisting from the Bronze Age right through to
its drainage in the nineteenth century. In the main
coastal zone, however, these intervals tended to be
followed by renewed marine flooding.
Settlement and salt-making in the
Romano-British marshes
One of the most notable of these periods came in
the Romano-British era, when some of the major
roddons of the marshes silted up and areas of the
former saltmarshes became dry enough for
settlement. So, the channel of former great
Witham roddon north of Boston has Romano-
British settlement sites and finds scattered all
across the top of it, as can be seen in the map to
the right. Similarly, at Hogsthorpe, near Chapel St
Leonards, there is evidence for Romano-British
era settlement and agricultural activity, some
directly above late prehistoric salt-making sites,
and it is thought that a fortified Roman ferry-port
was constructed on the coast at Old Skegness, just
offshore of where the end of the pier used to be.
However, this doesn’t mean the entire coastal
region was dry then, only perhaps slightly higher
elements of it; indeed, some of the identified
settlement sites are thought to have been
associated with continuing salt-production. As
such, we should probably think of the Romano-
British coastal zone as one that allowed significant
settlement activity to take place, but also one that
was still in many areas a coastal and marshland
environment.
Figure 3.1: The late prehistoric creek systems near Boston,
showing the Witham roddon with Romano-British (yellow)
finds and sites atop it.
Figure 3.2: An Early Anglo-Saxon pendant, from one of the
islands in the coastal marshes (Portable Antiquities Scheme,
LIN-7A7C04, CC BY-SA 4.0).
10
The Late/post-Roman marine
transgression and Anglo-Saxon
activity in the marshes
At the end of the Romano-British era, the
entire coastline saw significant changes
once again, with sea-flooding that
deposited a metre of more of sediment on
top of many Romano-British sites on the
Outmarsh. The creek systems visible there
on Lidar probably have their origins in this
final major marine transgression, although
in the Wash region the flooding didn’t
reach as far inland as the prehistoric floods
did. The usage of this renewed coastal
wetland landscape in the early medieval
period can be hard to trace beyond the
creeks and rivers themselves. In particular,
the vast majority of Early Anglo-Saxon
finds from the project zone come from the
islands of higher ground that remained
above the floods and the dry Middle Marsh
margins, at sites near Chapel Point, Burgh-
le-Marsh, Cumberworth, Stain (Withern),
and elsewhere. It is highly likely that the
extensive saltmarshes of this period were
used by these communities, for grazing and
salt-making, but the evidence is thin. Slightly more data is available for the Middle Saxon period (7th to 9th
centuries AD) from the coastal marshes themselves, however, with finds from the Fishtoft, Saltfleet and
Burgh-le-Marsh/Ingoldmells areas, including a possible salt-making site from Fishtoft.
Figure 3.3: Significant place-names in the northern Lincolnshire Marsh categorized by their language and meaning,
with the 3m contour inland of the Outmarsh (i.e. the edge of the coastal marshes) shown. The only Old English
names in the Outmarsh are river-names, names related to boundaries (Mar Haven), and those indicating seasonal
salt-making sites (North Cotes and the two Somercotes). Underlying modern mapping © OpenStreetMap
contributors, available under the Open Database Licence.
Figure 3.4: Detail of the early medieval Toft Haven area, showing the
distribution of Middle Saxon finds and sites in this area (Underlying
mapping: OS Six Inch, National Library of Scotland).
11
The Lincolnshire coastal marshes in the Viking era and afterwards
The 9th to 12th centuries AD saw notable changes along this coastline. On the one hand, place-names suggest
that a number of look-outs and fortifications were constructed overlooking or even on the marshes, which
might be associated with Viking-era coastal defence (as is discussed elsewhere). On the other hand, there is
good evidence for an increasing amount of activity in the coastal marshes themselves.
That this was indeed a key period in terms of the settlement and reclamation of the marshes is indicated
by both the place-name and the documentary sources. In the northern coastal marshes, for example, almost
all the villages on the edge of marsh have names of Old English/Anglo-Saxon origins, whilst many on the
Outmarsh surface itself have names with Scandinavian roots, suggesting permanent settlement in and after
this era but perhaps not before (fig. 3.3). Indeed, those settlement-names on this part of the Outmarsh that
have Old English roots are either landscape terms (usually river-names) or seem to indicate seasonal salt-
making settlements, as in the case of Somercotes (‘summer salt-makers’ cottages’). Documentary sources
generally support the idea of permanent settlement in the Outmarsh being primarily a 9th/10th century and
after phenomenon. Certainly, by the time of Domesday Book in the late 11th century it is clear that some
of the modern villages—such as
Grainthorpe—were already well-
established, although others like
Marshchapel and the new town of
Wainfleet seem to date from after
this.
Archaeological finds offer
additional confirmation of this
picture, with the Late Saxon (or
Anglo-Scandinavian) era being better
represented by finds on the surface of
the coastal marshes than earlier
periods are. Many of these finds are
believed to relate to salt-making
activity, as in the Wrangle area and in
Marshchapel parish, whilst others
look to be evidence for the
establishment of permanent
settlements, including finds of
sculptural material indicative of pre-
Norman churches, as at Conisholme.
In some cases, waste-mounds from
salterns appear to have offered the
slightly higher, drier ground needed
for building settlements and churches,
although settlements are also found
beside or on top of roddons, as at
Skidbrooke and Saltfleetby, or on the
slightly higher ground offered by
former coastlines and sand bodies.
Related to the evidence for
permanent settlement beginning in
earnest in this era are the existence of
large numbers of sea-banks, especially
Figure 3.6: An arguably 11th-century lead spindle whorl with runes referring to
Odin and Heimdall, found in Saltfleetby St Peter parish (Portable Antiquities
Scheme LIN-D92A22, CC BY-SA 4.0).
Figure 3.5: Map of the Skidbrooke to Theddlethorpe area showing pre-1100
finds (Underlying mapping: OS Six Inch, National Library of Scotland).
12
in the north and the south of the study
zone. These indicate a progressive and
sometimes complex process of sea-
defence and desalinisation from the Late
Saxon era through to the medieval
period and beyond, allowing settlement
and agriculture on the Outmarsh.
Unfortunately, many former banks in the
central area from Skegness–Chapel Point
and Sandilands–Theddlethorpe have
been lost to coastal erosion. However, a
substantial section of sinuous sea-bank
still exists on the east coast between
Sandilands and Chapel Point, which is
thought likely to be medieval in date. In
contrast, the ‘Roman Bank’ in Skegness
is believed to be a 16th-century edifice
constructed after the loss of Old
Skegness and its haven banks to the sea,
and to the south of Skegness there is an
extensive area of post-medieval sea-
banks. These banks enclosed an ever-
larger area of former marsh in Skegness,
Croft and Wainfleet, reclaiming an
exceptional amount of land from the sea,
a process that also occurred in the north
around Tetney to North Somercotes.
Figure 3.7: Map showing the likely stages of reclamations seawards of
Croft Bank from the later 16th century onwards, set against the Lidar data
& showing the ancient saltmarsh creeks (Underlying mapping: OS
1:25,000 1945–71 [1948, 1949], National Library of Scotland, CC BY 4.0).
Figure 3.8: The area around Huttoft on the east coast, showing former channels and a section of probable medieval sea-bank,
known locally as ‘Roman Bank’: this is the sinuous raised land to on the east near to the sea. Note, land below c. 2.5m OD is in
light blue and land above this in shades of green (Underlying mapping: OS Six Inch, National Library of Scotland).
13
4 Salt and Creeks in the Lincolnshire Coastal Zone: Making a
Living in the Marsh
Introduction
The exceptionally rich and dynamic coastal landscape of Lincolnshire, with its wide saltmarshes, winding
marine creeks, and long shorelines, constituted a valuable resource for the people who lived beside and
within it. One major benefit was its potential for large-scale salt-making, an industry that produced an
essential ingredients of life and one that was both widely used and relatively hard to source in the medieval
period and before.
The earliest salt-making on the Lincolnshire coastline
Although we have evidence for salt production on the east coast of England from the Neolithic period
onwards, the earliest evidence currently known from the Lincolnshire coastal zone belongs the Late Bronze
Age, with salt-making sites from this period known at Stickford and Tetney. More common are certain or
possible Iron Age to Romano-British saltern sites, which are scattered all along the region from Tetney to
Old Leake, with particular concentrations in the Wrangle area and the southern Outmarsh. These sites are
known primarily from chance finds, excavations and field-walking, as whilst they don’t leave an obvious
trace in the Lidar evidence, they do have an artefact signature, including shallow containers in which the
brine was heated and a range of pedestals or ‘handbricks’ (which bear fingermarks and occasionally
fingerprints) and other securing devices for these, all of which are collectively known as ‘briquetage’. In
consequence, the concentrations of finds probably reflect areas with exceptional levels of fieldwork, by
Betty Kirkham and the Fenland Survey amongst others. This supposition is confirmed by recent finds of
these items in areas where they were previously unknown, such as in the vicinity of Sandilands, during large-
scale excavations taking place there. Quite how late this type of salt-making continued is difficult to say,
but some probably Middle Saxon briquetage is known from the Fishtoft area, and the ‘old way’ of making
salt seems to have also been used at a 10th- to 12th-century saltern discovered at Marshchapel.
Figure 4.1: Two maps showing the distribution of Iron Age (orange)/Romano-British (yellow) salt-making sites in the Wrangle
area (left) and the Ingoldmells–Addlethorpe area (right), along with a plot of the channel features identified in these areas.
14
The ‘new way’ of making salt: the medieval saltern mounds of the Lincolnshire coast
Whilst salt-making sites of the above type do not leave an identifiable mark on the modern landscape that
can be easily read from Lidar, the saltern mounds of waste silt and sand that were produced by the medieval
to early modern sand-washing salt industry most definitely do. Waste mounds of this industry, which only
came to an end in the 17th century, often reach up to 5m OD or more in height and can cover considerable
areas, especially in the most intensively worked parts of the coastline where the mounds merge together to
form an odd, hilly landscape to the seaward of old coastlines and medieval sea-banks. The presence of large
areas of such mounds along the Lincolnshire coastline has long been known, and the Lidar evidence allows
this industry to be mapped in considerable detail.
Perhaps the best-known block of these sites lies in the northern Outmarsh, from Tetney to North
Somercotes, where around 23 million cubic metres of waste silt have been calculated to have been mounded
up all along the coastal zone from probably the Late Saxon period onwards to form an area approximately
7km long and up to 2km wide. The Lidar evidence for these mounds matches up exceptionally well with
Haiwarde’s 1595 mapping of the mounds of the salt industry in Marshchapel parish, and shows nicely how
the oldest, westernmost mounds in the group (up to 4.5km inland from the current coastline) have merged
together, whilst the most recent mounds—still in use in 1595—to the east still stand apart as separate
‘islands’. Of particular interest here are the fact that the Lidar evidence allows not only lines of mounds
Figure 4.2: A salt evaporation pan and a ‘handbrick’ pedestal with a thumb impression, both of which were found at Ingoldmells
(Sources: C. R. Green; M. Laing, ‘Who made the white gold? Exploring the demographics of Iron Age salt production in England
through fingerprint analysis’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 88 (2022), 79–96, doi:10.1017/ppr.2022.11, fig. 8, CC BY 4.0).
Figure 4.3: The raised platform of a saltern mound at Eau Bank End, North Somercotes, which rises to around 5m OD at its
highest (C. R. Green)
15
parallel to coast to be recognized within the westernmost, merged mounds, but also ‘gaps’ in the distribution
of these mounds to be identified. Indeed, these gaps are clearly visible and appear to be related to major
creeks and havens of the early medieval–high medieval period. This suggests that they remained active
marine channels when at least the first generation or so of medieval salterns were in use, and that the block
of saltern mounds was built up initially around these creeks, only cutting off their landward ends from the
sea at some point later in the medieval period.
The other major block of saltern mounds rising up to 5–7 m OD lies in the south of the Land on the
Edge study area, between Wainfleet and the former Wrangle/Old Leake haven-mouth, now the parish
boundary between these villages. This block is around 12km long, and it has recently been suggested that
it contains over 90 million cubic metres of waste silt. As in the north, the inner edge of this block of
mounds—known locally as the Tofts—is located up to 5km inland of the present-day coastline, due to
post-medieval reclamations of the saltmarshes that lay beyond them. Finds of Late Saxon material from
around the mounds suggest that the innermost, earliest line of these may well have their origins in this era,
whilst the most seaward mounds probably represent the 17th-century end of this industry. Of interest when
considering this block is both the lack of clear gaps for marine channels, as are found amongst the northern
mounds, and the fact that in the area of Wainfleet the mounds look very much like they consciously fill the
line of several former major creeks. Moreover, it is worth noting that the mid-12th-century ‘New Town’ of
Wainfleet, one of Lincolnshire’s major medieval coastal ports, is built atop the higher ground created by
these saltern mounds, indicating that the industry was already well-advanced there by the time that this
settlement was founded.
In addition to these great, coherent blocks of saltern mounds, other non-geological rises in the landscape
are visible in the Lidar of the flat coastal, alluvial plain, many of which are likely to represent other, more
local and less extensive, areas of salt-making activity. In the south at Wrangle and Old Leake, these show a
strong correlation with the identifiable former creeks of the Wrangle and Leake Havens, being located on
their edges or filling them, and a similar correlation is visible elsewhere in the study zone too. So, for
example, rises that have been identified as probable saltern mounds are found along the edge of the great
Figure 4.4: Map of the area from Tetney to Marshchapel, showing the location of the Late Saxon saltern at Marshchapel, along
with all the medieval saltern mounds identifiable in this area (marked in pink) and the certain and possible sea-banks (orange).
16
channel that once wended its way across the Outmarsh between Burgh-le-Marsh and
Addlethorpe/Ingoldmells, up to 6km or more inland from the current coast and associated in some cases
with medieval pottery and finds. Likewise, there are small groups of identifiable saltern mounds linked with
the medieval ports of Saltfleethaven and Mar Haven, with the structure of Saltfleethaven’s late medieval to
early modern harbour being partly made from them. Furthermore, Arthur Owen’s suggestion that a number
of churches in the Outmarsh were built on saltern mounds seems to be supported by the Lidar evidence.
Of especial interest may be those small groups of probable saltern mounds found inland of the two
great blocks of mounds. At Friskney and Wainfleet, for instance, there are probable saltern mounds inland
of the Tofts—in both places, they fill or abut what look to be former marine creeks inland of the western
edge of the Tofts, presumably the upper reaches of the original Friskney and Wainfleet Havens prior to
these being largely cut off from the sea by the Tofts, with a few outlying mounds also being found at the
village of Wainfleet St Mary. Similarly, in the Tetney area, Lidar, archaeological work, geological surveys
and aerial photographs show a scattering of relatively small salt-making sites up to 4km or so inland of the
inner edge of the main saltern block, some even being found in the valley to the west of Tetney village.
Although these could well be seen as earlier salterns than those in the main block, it is worth noting that
other Lidar and landscape evidence, including multiple sea-banks and local field-names like le Saltfenne
(recorded in the 12th century), suggest that this part of the Outmarsh may well have remained under marine
influence into the medieval era.
Conclusion
All told, a historical landscape reconstruction using Lidar and archaeological material allows the
identification of large numbers of salt-making sites all across the low-lying coastal plain from Boston to
Grimsby. This industry began in the prehistoric era but appears to have reached its height in the medieval
period, when tens of millions of cubic metres of waste silt were deposited in large areas along the then-
coastline in both northern and southern Lincolnshire, creating raised, hilly platforms that helped defend
this coastline and which will undoubtedly influence any future flooding of this exceptionally low-lying
landscape due to rising sea-levels.
Figure 4.5: Lidar image of the medieval saltern mounds of the Tofts, primarily shown in yellow; the green land to the east of the
Tofts are post-medieval reclaimed saltmarshes. The medieval ‘New Town’ and port of Wainfleet atop the saltern mounds is
indicated by a red outline (Lidar data © Environment Agency 2021, Open Government Licence v3.0)
17
5 The Medieval Ports and Havens of the Lincolnshire Coastline
Introduction
The early coastal landscape of Lincolnshire was characterized by wide marshes, winding creeks (some
hundreds of metres wide), large areas of sand, dunes and flats, and occasional islands of dry land. This
dynamic coastal zone saw considerable and increasing economic and settlement activity from the 9th century
AD onwards, and by the medieval period there was a significant network of ports and havens all up the
coast from Boston to Grimsby.
Boston
The most famous of Lincolnshire’s seaports, Boston was
probably founded in or around the 11th century on a raised
early medieval channel deposit, or ‘roddon’, of the River
Witham. By the 12th century it was clearly of sufficient
importance that it came to the attention of the great Muslim
scholar al-Idrīsī, working in Sicily in around 1154. Indeed,
Boston has been described as a ‘medieval boom town’. With
its ability to cater for larger ships, good links with Germany
and Scandinavia, and the growth of the wool trade, Boston
found itself in a very favourable position. By the 13th
century, it was the most important port in England for the
shipment of wool, England’s premier export, and in the 14th
century around 3% of its population were born outside
England, although in subsequent centuries its importance
fluctuated and declined.
Toft, Leake, Wrangle and Friskney Havens
Toft, Leake, Wrangle and Friskney formed a line up the
coast from Boston to Wainfleet. Toft was a ‘creek of
considerable magnitude’ running from Fishtoft down to
around Hob-hole Sluice, and it is claimed that boats could
still sail up to near the church as late as c. 1700; certainly, in
Figure 5.1: The North Sea and the east coast of England on al-Idrīsī’s mid-twelfth-century Arabic map, from a mid-thirteenth- to
early fourteenth-century copy. Note, north is at the bottom and south at the top; the river running across the centre of the image
is the Witham with Boston on the left and Lincoln on the right, whilst Grimsby is shown on the coast to the north of the river
(Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des Manuscrits, Arabe 2221, f. 338v–339r; PD).
Figure 5.2: Lidar image of Toft Haven, adjusted to
show the latest, down-cut channels and Fishtoft
glacial till island, which has evidence of Middle
Saxon activity; the major banks in this area are also
marked in orange (Underlying map source: OS Six
Inch 1906, National Library of Scotland).
18
the 16th century ships from Fishtoft were involved in the wool trade and the creek was under official watch
for pirates. Leake and Wrangle havens were more important and may have shared a common mouth, with
vessels from the latter involved in transporting large amounts of Lincolnshire salt to the herring-fair at
Yarmouth in the 14th century and the Wool Fleet in 1471, whilst there was apparently a lighthouse well
inland of the current coastline at Leake in the Early Modern era. Friskney, in contrast, is mostly
undocumented and may have largely ceased to function in the Late Saxon/Anglo-Scandinavian era.
Wainfleet
Located on a significant tidal inlet, the medieval town was built in the 12th century on higher ground created
by the waste mounds of the medieval salt industry. Like Boston, it was extremely prosperous and ranked
amongst the most important towns of Lincolnshire in the 14th century, exporting both salt and wool. Its
prosperity declined significantly after this, however, and by 1560 it was described as a ‘poor beggarly town’
with no merchants, the haven suffering from silting and increasingly shifting away from the town.
Skegness
Although now a significant coastal town, Skegness in the mid-18th century was little more than a few
buildings and a church. However, it had not always been like this. In the 16th century, it was claimed that
there had been ‘a great haven town’ here that was destroyed by the sea earlier in the 1500s. In general, this
is a credible tale. Official records refer both to a medieval harbour here and the town being destroyed, and
Skegness was explicitly described as ‘a good port’ in a set of 12th-century sailing directions (in contrast to
many of the others on the Lincolnshire coast). Indeed, in the 14th century Skegness was one of the main
home ports of Lincolnshire’s fishermen, while in the 15th century it imported wood and other goods from
Scandinavia for the building of Tattershall Castle.
Figure 5.3: Lidar image of the Wainfleet area annotated with the major features, including banks in orange (Underlying mapping:
OS Six Inch, National Library of Scotland; Lidar data in this and figs 5.2 and 5.5 © Environment Agency 2021, Open
Government Licence v3.0).
19
Ingoldmells and Schalflet
The port of Schalflet (‘shallow estuary’) is placed
north of Skegness in a set of 12th-century sailing
directions. Medieval references associate this
name with Burgh Common and an area within
‘Orby meadows’—given that Burgh Common
lay on the line of a massive, 300m-wide medieval
creek that once flowed from there to the coast
via Orby marsh, reaching the sea between
Ingoldmells and Chapel St Leonards, the sea-end
of this creek (lined by medieval sea banks) must
be a very plausible candidate for the port of
Schalflet. This inlet had probably partially silted
up by the end of the medieval period, as some of
its mouth was reclaimed as arable land then, but
it was still probably open to some degree. It may
also have been the pirate-infested creek known
as ‘Ingoldmells Haven’, or ‘Thieves’ Creek’, in
the later 16th century.
Wilgrip (Theddlethorpe)
Established by the 12th century at the latest, Wilgrip Haven’s location has been variously given as ‘The Old
Gout’/haven between Theddlethorpe and Mablethorpe (Crook Bank car park) or the outfall of Woldgrift
Drain between Mablethorpe and Trusthorpe, the latter primarily due to the name. Of the two, the former
is significantly more plausible, not least because The Old Gout seems to be related to the mouth of a large,
early medieval estuarine river visible on Lidar that flowed from Alford to Theddlethorpe and reached the
sea just to its north, with this river appearing, significantly, to have been diverted at some point into the
present Woldgrift Drain. The last mentions of Wilgrip as an actual port/creek date from the 16th century;
subsequently, the minor haven here was known as Theddlethorpe Haven in the 18th century and was the
location for the local lifeboat and smugglers in the 19th century.
Saltfleethaven
Saltfleethaven was the most
important port on the coast
between Wainfleet and Grimsby
and is mentioned repeatedly in
medieval documents, starting
with Domesday Book in the 11th
century. The current haven,
constructed in the 19th century,
doesn’t reflect the larger medieval
harbour that once existed here
and which can still be seen on
Lidar, located at the conjunction
of several large estuarine rivers
and creek systems. The origins of
Saltfleet lie in the Anglo-Saxon
era and there is a notable
concentration of early medieval
archaeological finds near here.
Trade from Saltfleet in the
medieval period included grain,
Figure 5.5: The original extent of Saltfleet Haven. Note, the original haven was cut
off from the sea in the 17th century by the long sea-bank upon which the windmill
currently stands (Underlying mapping: OS Six Inch, National Library of Scotland).
Figure 5.4: The Old Gout, as it appeared on the 1819 OS draft
map of Theddlethorpe, showing The Old Gout filled with water
(Source: British Library, Maps OSD 284/Wikimedia Commons).
20
fish and wool; as at Wainfleet,
however, the clogging of the
harbour with silt was a perennial
problem that ultimately caused the
haven to decline significantly and
move away from the settlement.
Mar (Somercotes), Swine
(Grainthorpe) and
Northcotes havens
Several havens and ports are
mentioned between Saltfleet and
Humberston, of which these three
were the most significant, the first
two being mentioned in Domesday
Book. Mar Haven fell out of use in
the 13th century; it lay on the
boundary between Skidbrooke and
Somercotes, and traces of it can
still be seen on Lidar. Swine Haven
was probably located just seaward
of the northern part of
Grainthorpe village, but was
pushed further away over time by a
combination of silting, salt-
mounds and reclamations—
Grainthorpe Haven at the coast is
the latest version of it, dug in the
19th century. Northcotes Haven
was the wide channel of an
estuarine river running to the south
and east of the village of North
Coates and, like Swine, it gradually
moved further east over time.
Although often said to have been
in notable decline since the 13th century, there were significant numbers of ships here in the 14th century
and the Northcotes creek was under official watch for pirates in the late 16th century.
Grimsby
Grimsby was a major port town and medieval borough, established beside a marine creek in the saltmarshes
by the River Humber. Unlike Boston and the other ports, it was at least partly rooted on a firm glacial clay
promontory projecting into the marshes, rather than solely atop marine sediments or saltern mounds. In
terms of origins, these are traditionally ascribed to the Viking era, although there are indications that there
was some sort of significant earlier activity in the local area, including a probably pre-Viking coastal lookout
hill and fort just to the west at Toote Hill, Little Coates. As to its medieval trading, Grimsby never rivalled
Boston, which was a port of national importance; nonetheless, it did have local and even regional
significance, including Scandinavian connections, and it is 1 of only 3 coastal ports north of the Thames
mapped by the great Islamic scholar al-Idrīsī in c. 1154. Like other Lincolnshire ports, Grimsby saw
significant decline from the later medieval period, which continued until the silting up of its harbour was
finally solved in the 19th century.
Figure 5.6: The area around Grainthorpe, showing banks (orange), saltern
mounds (pink), and the development of Swine Haven from the early medieval
period (Underlying mapping: OS Six Inch, National Library of Scotland).
21
6 The Lost Islands of the Lincolnshire Marsh and Coast
Introduction
The Lincolnshire coast, as it exists today, is only a few centuries old. Once there was a wide expanse of
coastal marshes here, stretching up to a mile seaward of the present beaches and to up to 10km inland of
them. Human activity in this wetland landscape was often drawn to any slight rise in the landscape. Some
of these rises were natural islands formed at the end of the last Ice Age; marine flooding from around 6000
BC gradually drowned the gently rolling land here, leaving only the tops of the small hills protruding as
islands. Others were sandbanks, dunes, former river channels or coastlines, where natural processes built
up a slight rise compared to the surrounding marsh. And yet others were created, usually accidentally, by
human activity, especially salt-making.
The offshore barrier islands
Perhaps the most important islands of the
Lincolnshire coast were a band of
offshore islands that protected the coast
from erosion and allowed the wide
saltmarshes and creek systems to develop.
Formed from the slightly higher ground
that once lay to the east and north of the
modern Lincolnshire and Norfolk
coastlines, they were originally part of a
glacial moraine left by the retreating ice-
sheets on what was then the land surface.
These islands extended south-eastwards
from Spurn Point and are believed to have
shielded the Lincolnshire seaboard from
the full ferocity of the storms and tides of
the North Sea, creating a sheltered tidal
lagoon between themselves and the main
coastline. This protection appears to have
finally failed during the 1200s, when the
offshore islands were destroyed by storms and floods. The debris that resulted from their destruction is
usually thought to have been cast up along the foreshore of the Lincolnshire Outmarsh as broad ‘storm
beaches’ and sand dunes, as at North Somercotes.
The clay islands of the medieval marsh
As the Lincolnshire Marsh flooded, the low hills became islands surrounded by saltmarshes, and these
offered some of the most important sites for settlement along the coast. One of these coastal zone ‘islands’
was Stain Hill near Mablethorpe, which rises from the surrounding marine alluvium to reach a maximum
height of 9m above sea-level. Significant quantities of Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon finds from this
island, along with aerial photographs, suggest that there was some sort of significant settlement or estate
centre located on this elevated point. Subsequently, it became the site for medieval village and a chapel,
with a moated manor house at its foot, although the village, church and manor have now largely
disappeared.
To the east of Alford there is another, much larger island-group, now occupied by the villages of Thurlby,
Mumby, Anderby, Huttoft and Cumberworth. There is good evidence for Romano-British and Anglo-
Saxon-era activity here, not only from the names Huttoft and Cumberworth (which are Old English in
origin), but also from metal-detected finds and archaeological excavations. Chance finds from
Cumberworth parish include part of a Late Roman crossbow brooch, potentially indicative of the presence
of the Late Roman military in the very late 4th/early 5th centuries AD, a Late Roman clipped silver siliqua
Figure 6.1: The Lincolnshire coastline in the late prehistoric period,
showing the persistent offshore barrier islands set against the modern
coastline (Underlying modern mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors,
available under the Open Database Licence).
22
of Arcadius, struck at Milan
in 395–402, and an Anglo-
Saxon silver coin of c. 680–
710. At the same time,
excavations at St Helen’s
Church in the village of
Cumberworth itself have
seen the recovery of 26
burials from an Anglo-
Saxon cemetery that was in
turn overlain by a timber
church, this last being
probably demolished by the
end of the tenth century.
Finally, to the south-east of
this island group were a
scattering of smaller dry
islands in the coastal
marshes heading out
towards the open sea,
including one now occupied
by the villages of Helsey and
Hogsthorpe. Again, these
seem to have seen activity in
the Anglo-Saxon period,
with finds of metalwork and
even high-status gold pieces,
although some of the place-
names suggest more limited
activity, such as Helsey, ‘the
Figure 6.3: Reconstruction of the channel systems and islands in place in the central
Lincolnshire Marsh around Sandilands/Huttoft Bank, based on Lidar data, aerial
photographs and other sources.
Figure 6.2: The former islands are visible as slight rises in the flat Outmarsh, as seen here at Hannah, Old English hana + ēg, ‘the
island where cocks are found/bred’ or ‘Hana’s island’ (C. R. Green)
23
island where there is a shed for drying fish.’ Further south, there are small glacial islands at Croft, near
Wainfleet, and Fishtoft, where there is evidence for pre-Viking salt-making.
Islands of sand on the Lincolnshire coast
Some islands on the Lincolnshire coastline had much less solid footings. Perhaps the most famous, or
infamous, of these is the medieval pirate island of Ravenserodd, which witnesses describe being thrown up
by the waves in the first half of the 13th century somewhere offshore of Grimsby, perhaps in the vicinity of
Spurn Point. Initially used for drying nets, the sand island had become the site of a market and a fair by
1251, and by 1290 the town and port of Ravenserodd had begun to seriously threaten the trade of nearby
Grimsby, with contemporary Grimsby folk declaring it a pirate island at the mouth of Humber, preying on
passing shipping. Indeed, the demise of this town during the following century was widely attributed to its
evil character—as one chronicler put it, ‘by its wicked works and piracies, it provoked the wrath of God
against itself beyond measure’ and was consequently swallowed by the sea. Over 200 buildings and
properties had been lost by the mid-1340s, and by 1362 the once-prosperous town was ‘destroyed to its
foundations’ and lay derelict, with its exact former location nowadays being uncertain.
Other sand ‘islands’ along the Lincolnshire coast include North Somercotes, which largely lies atop an
ancient sand-body first formed during the initial prehistoric flooding of the land here and which was then
supplemented by storm beaches after the destruction of the offshore barrier islands. ‘Old Skegness’, an
ancient haven town lying just offshore from the current Skegness and which was destroyed by the sea in
the 1500s, was probably built on such a sand body too. Needless to say, most of these ‘islands’ were, like
Raveserodd, very much at the whim of the tides. Burcom, for example, now exists as a sand bank below
low-tide level close to the south shore of the Humber near Grimsby; however, it has an old name, OE
*burg-cyme or *burg-cuma, meaning either ‘arrival at the town’ or ‘arriver at the town’, and on some 19th- and
early 20th-century maps and charts it seems to be shown as a dry sand—one that remained above the sea at
Figure 6.4: A 1702–1707 edition of Captain Greenvile Collin’s chart of the River Humber, showing the islands of sand
here, including Sunk Island of the coast of Holderness at the point where it was still an island in the process of
reclamation, Burcom at the entrance to Grimsby Haven, and Bull Sand in the mouth of the Humber (Source: New York
Public Library Map Div. 02-295, Public Domain).
24
high tide—or even an island, suggesting that its character may well have fluctuated over the centuries.
Similarly, ‘The Bull’ or Bull Sand, next to Humberston, is shown as an island in 1541 and a ‘dry sand’ in
1595, but had ceased to be so by the 17th century; it is currently the site of Bull Sand Fort, a 4-storey steel
and concrete fortification originally armed with four 6-inch guns and built 1915–1919.
Islands of salt
The final category of lost Lincolnshire
coastal islands are the ‘saltern mounds’, large
piles of waste silt and sand produced by the
medieval salt-making industry. These
mounds, some standing 6m above sea-level,
initially acted as dry islands in the coastal
marshes, and as each generation of mounds
were reclaimed they became part of an
undulating landscape on the landward edge
of the coastal zone. The wide ridge of the
Tofts, running south-west from Wainfleet,
has its origins in such mounds. Likewise, the
landscape around Tetney, Marshchapel and
Grainthorpe is largely constructed from
these islands: the industry here was still in
operation in 1595, when William Haiwarde’s
drew a detailed map of Fulstow and
Marshchapel, and only ceased operation in
the early 17th century.
Figure 6.5: Map of the Humber in Élisée Reclus’s Universal Geography IV: The British Isles (London, 1876),
p. 235. This shows Burcom as an island in the Humber to the north of Grimsby and Sunk Island attached
to the north bank (Internet Archive, Public Domain).
Figure 6.6: A Lidar image of the saltern mounds in the Marshchapel
area (© Environment Agency 2021, Open Government Licence v3.0).
25
7 The Drowned Towns and Villages of the Lincolnshire Coastline
Introduction
Up until the 13th century, the coast of Lincolnshire was protected by a series of offshore coastal barrier
islands that were once low hills on the plain of Doggerland until the latter flooded 9,000 years ago to
become the North Sea. These islands created a sheltered tidal lagoon between themselves and the main
coastline, but this protection appears to have failed during the 1200s, as the offshore islands were finally
destroyed by a series of storms and floods in that century. With the foreshore no longer protected, the sea
began to make significant inroads into the land here, reclaiming a mile or more from the coast between
Mablethorpe and Skegness by the end of the sixteenth century and destroying a number of low-lying coastal
settlements in the process.
Mablethorpe St Peter
The storm surges of 1286 and 1288 are often considered to be the events that finally overwhelmed the
offshore barrier islands, and they seem to have caused significant damage to the Lincolnshire coast too,
particularly in the neighbouring medieval parishes of Mablethorpe St Peter (now lost) and Mablethorpe St
Mary. The church of Mablethorpe St Peter lay offshore north-east from the modern main Mablethorpe
pullover, and both the Louth Park Abbey Chronicle and the Hagnaby Abbey Chronicle both relate that the church
of Mablethorpe St Peter was ‘rent asunder by the waves of the sea’ and ‘entirely destroyed’ in storms during
these years. The Hagnaby chronicle goes on to relate that ‘many men, uncounted sheep, and an unknown
number of cattle perished’ in February 1288 and that ‘the sea did very great damage in Mablethorpe’ in
August of the same year.
Despite its obviously vulnerable
coastal position, the rebuilding of
Mablethorpe St Peter’s church
appears to have been begun a short
time after these floods and on the
same site, with money from the local
tithes and offerings assigned to this
from May 1290. Whether the church
of Mablethorpe St Mary was also
damaged in these floods is
unrecorded, although it may be
significant that it too was being rebuilt
in the early 1300s; in this case,
however, the rebuilding took place
well inland, on a new site where the
church currently stands. This was
clearly the more sensible course, as the
flooding continued at intervals until
the late 1530s, when the church of St
Peter, its village and the greater part of
its parish were ‘overflown with water
in the sea’ and never recovered, with
further floods continuing into the 17th
century. As late as the 1870s, the
church ruins could still be seen from
the dune-top and finds from
Mablethorpe St Peter occasionally
turn up on the beach here.
Figure 7.1: The view over Mablethorpe beach to the north of the pullover; the
settlement and church of Mablethorpe St Peter is said to lay offshore in this
area, with part of the church ruins apparently still able to be seen north-east
of the main Mablethorpe pullover as late as the 1870s (C. R. Green)
26
Old Skegness
A similar calamity befell ‘old Skegness’ in the early 16th century. Probably originally a Roman defended ferry
port of some significance, the medieval port of Skegness was located on a creek at the western entrance to
the Wash, where it was sheltered by a ‘ness’ or promontory of dunes and beaches running south from the
Ingoldmells shore. In 1500 Skegness was said to be ‘in very great danger of the sea’, and in or about 1526
the town was finally taken by the sea, a contemporary ecclesiastical subsidy recording that the ‘church and
a great part of the parish was submerged’. By 1540, the town seems to have been entirely swallowed up by
the waves, although ‘manifest tokens of old buildings’ including the church were said to be visible at low
tide into the 17th century, located around half a mile or so out to sea. A new settlement and church at
Skegness was subsequently constructed further inland, but this was considered ‘a poor new thing’ and ‘New
Skegness’ remained little more than a hamlet until the 19th century.
Sutton on Sea
Skegness and Mablethorpe St Peter were not alone in this destruction. Not only were two hamlets within
Skegness parish, called East and West Meales, also taken by the sea in the early 16th century, but Sutton-in-
the-Marsh (modern Sutton on Sea) clearly suffered a parallel fate. Its church is recorded in 1398–1409 as
Figure 7.2: A suggested reconstruction of the coastline prior to the loss of Old Skegness in the early 16th century,
along with the known sea-banks still surviving. The 17th-century Green Bank interestingly outlines a probable new
later 16th- and 17th -century haven and also seems to suggest, via a gap in it, that the Winthorpe creek was still active
when it was built. The ‘Haven Bank’ is mentioned in the 16th century, whilst the medieval sea-banks to the south of
Skegness seem to survive as Croft Bank/the High Street (Map source: OS Six Inch, National Library of Scotland).
27
having been ‘since destroyed by the sea’, and the
replacement church seems to have been itself eaten by
the sea in the mid-16th century, along with ‘some houses
inhabited, and very much of the best grounds in our said
town’. The third church was constructed inland and
formed the core of the present-day Sutton on Sea,
although the sea continued to attack the coast here and
cause significant floods, and the church fell into such
ruin that it again needed rebuilding!
Chapel St Leonards
Similar accounts of a lost church and settlement survive
from Trusthorpe, between Mablethorpe and Sutton, but
perhaps the most dramatic account of a Lincolnshire
coastal village being destroyed by the sea comes from the
former Mumby Chapel, modern Chapel St Leonards. In
1570, the worst storm of the 16th century appears to have
almost completely levelled the settlement here, as
Holinshed related in his contemporary Chronicles, saying
that ‘the whole town was lost, except three houses…
Likewise, the church was wholly overthrown except the
steeple... Master Pelham lost eleven hundred sheep at
Mumby Chapel’. He also recounts that the tide was so
high that a ship was driven upon the top of a house in
the village; the sailors, thinking it a rock, leapt onto it for
safety and only survived by clinging to its roof. Whilst
up there, they succeeded in rescuing the mistress of the
house, who had apparently been ‘lying in childbed’,
although her husband and child drowned.
Later flooding and erosion
Although the most dramatic losses seem to have been over by the end of the 16th century, flooding and
erosion continued along the coast from Mablethorpe to Skegness. In 1645, for example, the inhabitants of
Figure 7.4: One possible reconstruction of the drowned
coastline and settlements of Lincolnshire. Robinson’s
suggested late medieval to 16th-century coastline is in
orange and set against the modern coastline (green).
Figure 7.3: A 15th-century painting of a sea-flood in Holland, showing the breaking of the sea-bank—much of
Holland was flooded, with the Dordrecht region seeing 23 villages submerged and 2,000 people dead (Source:
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam SK-A-3147-B, Public Domain)
28
Mablethorpe, Withern, Strubby and Maltby
were all exempted from a tax for coastal
defence owing to ‘their great loss lately
sustained by the inundation of the sea’,
whilst in 1730 the sea bank south of
Skegness was said to have been broken by
the sea and the rabbits of the warren there
were washed away. Similarly, the sea
overflowed the Ingoldmells Bank for over a
mile in 1735 and made a large breach in the
defences at Sutton in 1777. In the later 18th
century, it was said that 8 acres of land had
recently been consumed at Sutton, whilst a
flood mark on Winthorpe church tower
bearing the date 1837 is located nearly 3m
above the ground, despite the fact that the
church itself stands about 3m above sea-
level. Elsewhere, there were issues too. At
Cleethorpes, De la Pryme in 1697 observed
the sea washing away the cliffs, with huge
pieces ‘undermined and brought down
every great tide as bigg as whole churches
together’. He also reported the local
tradition that the villagers had lost ‘several
miles of land’ to the sea.
Such continued flooding had clear
landscape impacts even into the modern
era. The original Ingoldmells Point seems to
have been eroded away since the early 19th
century and the name transferred to the
outfall 200m further north than the original, whilst the old Scabbed Lamb at Ingoldmells, a noted smuggling
inn at Jackson’s Corner, was lost to the sea as late as the 1860s! Likewise, at Cleethorpes, the erosion there
was only halted in the late 19th century through the erection of the sea-wall and promenade, and this had to
be extended southwards to form the Kingsway in the early 20th century, when further erosion saw the road
running along the top of the cliff disappearing in cliff falls and the houses on the front under severe threat.
Figure 7.6: A visualisation of people taking refuge on a roof to escape the sea, based ultimately on
Holinshed’s description of the flooding of Mumby Chapel (Chapel St Leonards) in 1570 (Source: Louis
K. Harlow, in Jean Ingelow, High Tide on the Lincolnshire Coast (Boston, 1892), Library of Congress,
Public Domain).
Figure 7.5: Before and After Kingsway was built at Cleethorpes,
showing the low cliff being eroded towards the houses here.
29
8 Towns and Trade on the Lincolnshire Coast
Introduction
The story of towns and trade along the Lincolnshire coast is one of vastly varying fortunes. Probably the
oldest town along the coast was ‘Old Skegness’, which is often thought to have its origins as a walled Roman
‘small town’/ferry port, although it was only a relatively minor centre in the medieval period—albeit one
possessing a castle, a guildhall and a harbour—and was utterly destroyed by the sea in the 16th century.
Other towns have their origins in the medieval period, saw dramatic rises in their fortunes before declining
and then, in some cases, rising anew. Yet others are new creations of the 19th and 20th centuries, growing
up around the old bathing inns of the Georgian coast, and a final few have lived only in the minds of their
designers.
The earliest towns and trading
centres of the Lincolnshire coast
There was probably a second Roman
‘small town’ on the Roman-era
coastline at Burgh-le-Marsh, where a
large number of Roman coins and
other items have been found, whilst
imported Samian ware pottery from
Gaul is found at several sites in the
Roman saltmarshes. For example, the
finds from Saltfleetby St Peter indicate
that a high-status site with continental
contacts was located by the side of a
creek there. In the Anglo-Saxon era,
there seem to have been a number of
high-status settlements on islands in or
on the edge of the saltmarshes, the
most notable of which is the 7th- to 9th-
century monastic trading-centre at
Little Carlton. This has seen significant
finds of imported coinage and pottery
from the continent, as well as the
discovery of a small wharf running out
from the pre-Viking shoreline.
At the start of the medieval period,
the two premier towns and trading
centres on the Lincolnshire coast were
Grimsby and Boston. Both had
become important enough to attract
the attention of the great Muslim
scholar al-Idrīsī when he wrote about
and mapped England in about 1154,
being two of the only three coastal
towns he deemed worthy of note
Figure 8.2: ‘Plan of Boston, England’ in the
1830s, Thomas Moule, 1837, slightly cropped
(Source: The Norman B. Leventhal Map &
Education Center at the Boston Public Library;
licensed for reuse under a Attribution 2.0
Generic CC BY 2.0 licence via Flickr).
Figure 8.1: Lidar map of the ‘island’-like situation of the Middle Saxon site at
Little Carlton, which sat right at the edge of the coastal zone and had a small
wharf (© Environment Agency 2021, Open Government Licence v3.0).
30
north of the Thames. Indeed, in about 1200 Boston was second only to London in the scale of its overseas
trade, and may even have exceeded it, whilst its population of around 5,500 people made it the tenth largest
urban centre in 14th-century England. Boston’s trading activity was largely based around the wool trade, for
which it was England’s most important port, exporting wool from as far west as Cheshire and Flintshire.
English wool was famed not only in Europe for its quality, but also as far afield as Syria and Iran in the 13th
and 14th centuries. Boston consequently attracted significant numbers of migrants from an early date.
German and Flemish merchants involved in the wool trade were present here, as were Hanseatic merchants
from Baltic ports. Indeed, around 3% of its medieval population was born outside of England and in the
15th century Boston inhabitants included people born in the Netherlands, France, Scotland, Germany and
Norway, some of whom are believed to have run inns in the town.
Grimsby was a significantly less important port and town than Boston, and while it too had some strong
overseas trading connections—with Scandinavia in particular—that are recorded from the 11th century
onwards, they were on nothing like the scale that Boston’s were. It was, however, a more significant town
than the two medium-sized ports of the Lincolnshire coast, Wainfleet and Saltfleethaven. All of these towns
saw considerable activity through to the 14th century, but subsequently entered a period of decline, with
silting of the harbours being a major issue for all four. For Wainfleet, the decline was considerable, and by
1560, it was described as a ‘poor beggarly town’ with no merchants, and its later haven lies well away from
the town, whilst at Saltfleet silting, new sea banks, and attempts to straighten the haven saw it reduce in
size and move away from the town. Grimsby similarly saw a marked decline, such that in the late 18th
century more fish was being landed at inland Louth, via its canal, than there was at Grimsby. This reduced
status was only combatted by attempts to restore the harbour from the start of the 19th century, culminating
in the construction of new docks in the mid-19th century and a renewed importance for the town that saw
it become one of the fastest-growing towns in the country. Boston also saw a major collapse in its trade
towards the end of the medieval period. This led to contraction in the town, although from the 18th century
there was a degree of recovery, especially after the construction of the Grand Sluice in 1764–6 (which
allowed larger ships to enter the river), the straightening of the river to the Wash, and the construction of
the docks in 1884.
Figure 8.3: An early twentieth-century postcard of Grimsby Docks, showing the dock tower of 1852 (Source: Newberry Library
Postcards Collection, Internet Archive, Licence-free).
31
Bathing inns, railways and new towns
If Boston and Grimsby found new life during the 18th and 19th centuries, they were not alone. This period
also saw the seeds of a number of new coastal towns planted along the coast. The origin of Skegness,
Cleethorpes and Mablethorpe/Sutton-on-Sea all can be found in the later 18th century, when they became
home to fashionable Georgian sea-bathing inns and hotels. The initial inns were established at places that
were little more than hamlets previously, but the early to mid-19th century saw them acting as the core
around which new resorts grew. At Cleethorpes, for example, the Dolphin Inn/Cleethorpes Hotel was
joined by only 2 or 3 lodging-houses in 1803 in providing services for those wealthy visitors wishing to stay
there, but by the middle of the century there were two further bathing inns and 106 lodging-houses, with
1,300 visitors at a time in the 1850s. Likewise, Skegness was a very small hamlet before about 1770, its
original town and harbour having been lost over two centuries earlier, but
it saw notable growth in the late 18th and especially the 19th centuries after
the founding of two bathing hotels (the Vine and Hildred’s). Mablethorpe
followed a similar pattern, with a fashionable bathing inn (the Book in
Hand) forming a core around which a small resort grew by the mid-19th
century, with over 120 visitors resident in July 1855 and 4,000 ‘pleasure-
seekers’ descending on the place in a single day in August 1871.
These three places were not the only sites in Lincolnshire where such
bathing inns were established. A major factor that allowed Skegness,
Mablethorpe/Sutton and Cleethorpes to develop beyond small resorts and
into true towns was the connection of these places to the railway networks
Figure 8.4: Two maps of the growth of Skegness—(a) Extract from Greenwood’s Map of Lincolnshire (1830), showing the 3 areas
of settlement in Skegness by that time, one dominated by the Vine Hotel (or Skegness/Old Hotel) in the south, one around the
New Hotel (Hildred’s) on the old sea-bank, and one around the sixteenth- to eighteenth-century haven and its associated Ship
Inn in the north (Source: Daniel Crouch Rare Books). (b) Skegness in the 1950s (green) and the 2020s (blue, including caravan
parks), with the three pre-19th-century inns marked with yellow stars (Underlying map: OS Six Inch, National Library of Scotland.
Figure 8.5: Advert for excursions to the Lincolnshire resorts of Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe
and Skegness, 1880s (Source: Science Museum Group Collection © The Board of Trustees
of the Science Museum, released under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence).
32
of the 19th century, although this was arguably in turn influenced by the proven and continuing popularity
of those places with bathers and tourists compared to other bathing sites. Cleethorpes got its branch line
first in 1863, and 30,000 people subsequently arrived by train on 3 August that year, along with another
10,000 who arrived via the roads; by the end of the 19th century, it was home to nearly 40,000 people.
Skegness gained its railway in 1873, and on the August bank holiday of that year 10,000 trippers arrived in
the town. The increased popularity of Skegness due to the railway led to the creation of a new planned
town and ‘health resort’ here from the late 1870s, with wide roads and pavements, although the northern
part of the plan was never followed through. Mablethorpe was last to benefit, gaining a railway in 1877.
Whilst it too saw a significant surge in development, notably between the station and the beach, it grew
significantly more slowly than the other 2 ‘new towns’ and was never as popular. Although it gained urban
status in the 1890s and was locally significant, it still had less than 1,000 permanent inhabitants by 1901,
and only merged with Trusthorpe and Sutton in 1925.
Towns that never came to pass
In addition to the ‘new towns’ that did get built, there were also plans for coastal towns that never came to
fruition. One of the earliest of these was focused on Sutton-on-Sea, where a proposal to build a large, 10-
acre fish dock got so far as obtaining an Act of Parliament to allow its construction. Even more
transformative would have been Harry Teggin’s scheme for the construction of a massive ‘Great Wash
City’ of 750,000 people to the south of Skegness from 1966. This would have been built partly on the
marshes and partly in the Wash itself, providing a huge new deep-water port, vast new areas of reclaimed
lands, and enormous fresh-water reservoirs, at the cost of the entire Wash coastal zone from Skegness to
Hunstanton and beyond in Norfolk. Perhaps more plausible were the plans for a new ‘garden city’ on the
coast to be built at Huttoft—now the National Trust Sandilands site—and named Woldsea, which sought
financing in 1911. With large pleasure gardens, a cricket ground, a golf course, Mock Tudor houses and
hotels, and magnificent sands, it was intended as a gentile, quiet resort for the upper and ‘better middle’
classes, a Woodhall Spa-by-the-sea, but it eventually failed, perhaps because it was launched so close to the
start of World War One. The former golf course and Grange and Links hotel at Sandilands were amongst
the only tangible remains of the scheme, and both have recently been lost, leaving as the only remnant the
name of an isolated farmstead in Huttoft parish, Wold Sea Farm.
Figure 8.6: (a) Harry Teggin’s vision of a ‘Great Wash City’ to be built in the Wash; (b) Woldsea, as envisaged in its prospectus
(Underlying modern mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence).
33
9 Wrecks and Wreckers on the Lincolnshire Coast
Introduction
Despite its lack of high cliffs and sharp rocks, the Lincolnshire coast has long had a reputation as a danger
to shipping. In the 19th century it was said that this coastline was ‘perhaps the most dangerous in the
kingdom’, due to the paucity of good harbours and its treacherous shoals of shifting sands, and there are
dramatic tales of wrecks on the Lincolnshire coast, like the ship at Chapel St Leonards that was wrecked
upon the roof of a house during the major storm in 1570. Indeed, a single storm in 1833 left more than 30
ships sunk or beached on the Lincolnshire shoreline, whilst one in 1823 saw nearly 60 ships sunk or
stranded, and the skeletons of half-buried wooden ships wrecked here can still be seen on the coast at low
tides and after storms.
Wrecks, wreckers and the ‘right of wreck’ on the Lincolnshire coast
Although no medieval shipwreck remains are currently known from the beaches of Lincolnshire,
documentary sources make it clear that such wrecks did frequently occur and that the question of who
profited from the finding of them was a contested topic. Strictly speaking, the ‘right of wreck’ belonged to
either the king or the local lord, to whom wrecks must be reported, and the wreckage could furthermore
only be kept by them if no living thing survived the loss of the ship and no owner claimed the goods;
however, local mariners and other coastal inhabitants often had other ideas on both these points! For
example, in 1353 a ship named La Marie bound for Berwick on Tweed was driven ashore in a storm at the
medieval port of Saltfleethaven and broke up, scattering itself and its cargo of victuals and merchandise on
the shore, all of which ‘some evildoers carried away’. A royal commission was set up to retrieve the cargo
and the wreckage for the merchants who owned it, although it seems not to have met with much success,
these having been apparently widely appropriated and sold on—indeed, the merchants ended up appealing
to the king for his personal intervention in this case when the commission failed! Local documents similarly
tell of many medieval wrecks along the coast and the ‘wreckers’ or ‘beach harvesters’ who found them. In
December 1436, the Ingoldmells Court Rolls recorded as ‘wreck of the sea’ seven casks of beer (one of
which was found empty in Skegness church!), one cask of black soap, and multiple boards of fir and
Figure 9.1: Shipwreck at Sutton on Sea, located around 50 metres offshore; an edited version of an image by Richard
Hoare available on Geograph (© Copyright Richard Hoare and licensed for reuse under a CC BY-SA 2.0 licence).
34
wainscotts that were in the custody of several inhabitants of Ingoldmells and Skegness. Similarly, in 1302
William Lawys had a cow seized as punishment ‘for wreck of the sea carried away’ without reporting, and
in 1569 4 men—including one gentleman—were ordered to appear with the ‘certain iron war engine
[gun]… weighing six stone of iron’ that they had recovered from the beach.
Considerable local interest in the items thrown up by the rage of the sea continued well into the modern
era. In 1826, a government note described the inhabitants of the Saltfleet region as ‘Christian savages on
their sand-hills’, who, when they see a vessel driven onto the beach, ‘clap their hands and shout excitedly,
“Thank God a wreck!”’ Similar sentiments issued from the judicial bench. In April 1852, John Dobson was
given 18 months hard labour for ‘stealing… from a stranded ship’ at Saltfleet, and the Chairman of the
Bench at Louth accompanied his sentencing with ‘forcible observations upon the disgraceful reputation the
Lincolnshire wreckers were obtaining for their inhumanity’ by their preying on the ‘unfortunate mariners
so often wrecked upon the dangerous coast of East Lincolnshire’. This increasingly negative portrayal of
‘Lincolnshire wreckers’—perhaps more accurately described in most cases as ‘beach-combers’ or ‘beach
harvesters’—reflected a tightening of governmental control and the loss of customary wreck rights for both
lords and inhabitants in this era, and is comparable to the contemporary moral panics over ‘wrecking’ in
Cornwall and elsewhere. Despite this, however, the idea that items thrown up by the sea were there for the
taking continued to be securely embedded in the maritime communities of Lincolnshire, as can be seen
from the records of North Somercotes parish school, whose log-books make frequent comment on the
absences from school caused by wrecks. On 13 February 1871, for example, it was recorded that several
boys were absent ‘being occupied on the sea shore gathering coal, corn, etc. from wrecked vessels’. Likewise,
on 19 October 1869, it was said to be ‘Very stormy. 9 or 10 ships came ashore and many of the sailors
drowned. Very few children in school’, and on 6 December 1882 only 48 of 175 attended school after a
ship sank with the loss of all hands and the shore was ‘strewn with bags and wreckage’.
Saving lives on the Lincolnshire coast
Despite the 19th-century claims of the ‘inhumanity’ of Lincolnshire coastal communities, the same maritime
communities also fulfilled a key humanitarian role—wrecking, lifesaving, and rendering aid to those who
Figure 9.2: (a) The location of lifeboat stations of the first (yellow) and second (green) halves of the nineteenth century, showing
the relocation of some of these; (b) Shipwreck remains and records from the Lincolnshire coast on the CITiZAN database
(Underlying modern mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence)
35
had escaped the waters were not mutually exclusive activities for these communities. At first, such aid was
naturally done provided on an ad hoc basis, but over time it became increasingly regularized, with rescue
boats organized by local volunteers stationed along the coast, like that at Theddlethorpe which was
purchased by subscription in the 1790s and saved 22 vessels in just three years. This was all put on a formal
footing in the 1820s with the foundation of the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from
Figure 9.3: Life-boat service on the Lincolnshire coast from The London Illustrated News, vol. 77, issue 2162, 6 November 1880,
supplement, featuring the Skegness lifeboat, the second Herbert Ingram (Source: Internet Archive)
Figure 9.4: The first launch of the Mablethorpe lifeboat John Rowson Lingard in 1905, viewed by crowds on the
beach, from an early 20th-century postcard.
36
Shipwreck (later the RNLI) and the Lincolnshire Coast Shipwreck Association (founded 1827).
Subsequently, a number of lifeboat stations were founded and maintained for various periods from
Gibraltar Point to Grimsby, with the boats being staffed by volunteer local mariners who showed often
incredible heroism. The community investment in this activity can be seen in the North Somercotes school
logs record, which show not only significant pupil absences for wrecking, but also for the launch of the
new lifeboat at Donna Nook and for lifeboat rocket practice. It ought also to be remembered that members
of the coastal community who did not serve on the lifeboats also continued to take part in lifesaving too.
In 1833, for instance, the Donna Nook lifeboat crew tried and failed to launch the lifeboat to save a ship
named the Hermione, but kept getting blown back, so a local farmer Richard Hoodless mounted his horse
and swam it into the wild seas, succeeding in saving four of the eight-man crew by this method before the
vessel was wrecked.
The afterlife of vessels on the beach
The vessels that ended up on the Lincolnshire coast had a variety of fates. Some still lie there today, exposed
by the shifting sands and tides and recorded by groups such as CITiZAN, with notable concentrations
around Cleethorpes and Sutton-on-Sea. Others were taken by the local community and their lords, as
described above, or alternatively claimed by their owners, who often in the modern era arranged for the
breaking up of the ship and the sale of its constituent elements by local agents at auction. For example, in
1865 there was a sale of four hundred lots of ‘ship wood, saved from the Perseverance, of London’ at the Ship
Inn, Saltfleet, including 16,000 feet of oak and fir planking, 300 oak posts, and one ton of ‘iron bolts and
spikes’. Likewise, in 1883 the ‘ship wood’ from the vessel Fourth of November was being sold by auction on
land next to the Sea View Hotel, Skegness. Some vessels, however, were deliberately beached on the coast.
In the Mablethorpe area in particular, ship-breaking businesses are known to have operated on the beaches,
and many houses and properties in the coastal area are said to have had beams, gateposts or fences
constructed from reclaimed ship-wood. A few of the vessels escaped this fate, however. The Eliza, for
example, was bought at Kings Lynn in 1882 and towed to Skegness for breaking up on the beach. It was,
however, bought by one Joe Wingate. He kept the ship whole on the beach and turned it into a museum,
exhibiting marine curiosities including a 70ft whale skeleton—a role it played until 1911, when it was
toppled by a gale, after which it was finally broken up and sold for £16.
Figure 9.5: Skegness seafront in the early 20th century from a postcard of that era, showing ‘the ship Eliza’ in the background, a
schooner towed to Skegness beach for breaking up in 1882 that was purchased and used by Joe Wingate as a museum on the
beach.
37
10 Pirates and Smugglers on the Lincolnshire Coast
Introduction
Given its lengthy and lightly populated coastline prior to 19th century, characterized by wide marshes and
creeks, it is perhaps no surprise that the Lincolnshire seashore has plentiful evidence for both piracy and
smuggling, with the inhabitants of the coast being variously the victims of the former or the instigators of
both.
Lookouts and fortresses: protecting the
Lincolnshire coast in the Viking age
hat the Viking threat to the east coast of England
was, at first, piratical is clear; as Alcuin of York
put it in 797 AD, ‘a pagan people is becoming
accustomed to laying waste our shores with
piratical robbery’, and there are good indications
that the Lincolnshire coastal landscape was
fortified in response. In particular, a number of
names involving Old English tōt (‘lookout place’)
are found all along the coast and overlooking it,
along with names involving OE burh (‘fortress’)
in the same area, all of which may well reflect an
Anglo-Saxon/early Viking-era defensive system
designed to protect the coast. The most dramatic
of these sites was arguably Toote Hill (‘lookout-
hill’) near Grimsby, which was quarried away in
the 19th and early 20th centuries. This once stood
between 50 and 100ft high and had an early
earthwork fortress just to its west, both defensive
sites being located on a low clay promontory that
projected out into the coastal marshes.
Figure 10.2: A map of the area around Toote Hill, Little Coates, Grimsby, showing the location of Toote Hill (right)
and Cun Hu Hill (left) prior to modern quarrying and landscaping, based on the Rev. W. Smith’s etching of these
features in Oliver’s Monumental Antiquities of Great Grimsby (Hull, 1825). Dry land above 5m OD is in green and low-
lying land is in blue (Mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence).
Figure 10.1: A depiction of Viking raiders on the way to attack
the town of Guérande, France, in c. AD 919, from a manuscript
of c. 1100 (Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Département des Manuscrits. NAL 1390, f. 7r, Public Domain).
38
Medieval piracy and the ‘pirate island’ of Ravenserodd
As written documentation increased into the medieval era, the people of the Lincolnshire coast can be
definitely said to have ‘sinned as often as they were sinned against’ when it came to piracy. In 1387, for
example, three Grimsby men boarded a vessel from Wilgrip (a now-lost port near Theddlethorpe) at
Skegness and made off with its contents at night, whilst John Selby of Grimsby complained in 1365 that
Walter Skott, also of Grimsby, attacked his vessel with arrows at Saltfleethaven! In both cases, the
authorities could do little, it seems, and such piracy would appear to have been an accepted part of maritime
life, although punishments were sometimes metered out, as in 1228 when the William de Briggeho of
Grimsby was hanged at York for piracy. Not all incidents involved local people, however—in 1321, pirates
from Denmark attacked the London merchant ship La Margarete off the coast at Saltfleetby, causing £200
of losses (around £150,000 today), whilst in the following year three mariners from the medieval port of
Skegness made off with a ship from Estland (medieval Estonia) lying at anchor there!
Perhaps the most interesting example of piracy on the medieval Lincolnshire coast comes in the form
of its very own ‘pirate island’ located just off the coast from Grimsby, in the Humber mouth. The sand-
island of Ravenserodd seems to have been created by the ‘casting up of the sea’ in the 1230s and rapidly
evolved from being merely a place to dry nets to being a fully-functioning town with a charter and market.
By the 1290s, it had begun to seriously threaten the trade of Grimsby. The men of the latter accused those
living at Ravenserodd of piracy and using ‘fear and force’ to compel ships to dock there, rather than the
Lincolnshire borough, with the result that parts of Grimsby were becoming deserted! Fortunately for
Grimsby, the tide quite literally began to turn in the mid-14th century, with the ‘pirate island’ seeing first
erosion and flooding and then complete destruction between the 1330s and the early 1360s. Contemporary
chroniclers suggested that Ravenserodd, ‘by wrong-doing on the sea [and] by its wicked works and piracies’,
had ‘provoked the wrath of God against itself beyond measure’, and certainly no more was heard of it after
1362!
Pirates of the Elizabethan age and after
One of the more notable Lincolnshire pirates of the 16th century was William Johnson of Boston, who, in
his ‘ship all black’ that was ‘furnished with a quantity of munitions of war’, was accused in the 1560s of
repeatedly waylaying and stealing from Flemish merchant and fishing boats, in at least one case killing their
Figure 10.3: Hull in the first half of the seventeenth century; the pirates from Lincolnshire hanged here in 1579 were probably
executed in the same place as a Hull man convicted of murder and robbery on the high seas in 1593—he was hanged ‘by the
south blockhouse within Humber bankes’, just inland of what is now The Deep (Source: British Library/University of
Toronto, Wenceslaus Hollar Digital Collection, Public Domain).
39
captain. Johnson and his men reportedly committed their crimes ‘masked, and so disguised as they should
not be known’, before taking the spoils back to Boston to be sold. Needless to say, Boston was not alone
in having a piracy problem in the Tudor era. Multiple cases were reported in the 1570s of people either
receiving goods from pirates or of supplying them in the area from Boston to Grimsby. The government
took steps to deal with this issue in the reign of Elizabeth I, and deputies instructed to prevent both piracy
and smuggling were stationed at each creek and port, although this wasn’t wholly successful—in some cases
they seem to have actually worked with the pirates, either releasing them from custody (as Richard Holmes
did at Grimsby) or themselves supplying them (as Thomas Stone did from Wainfleet). Ingoldmells Haven
was apparently particularly notorious as a haunt of pirates, being said to be ‘otherwise called Thieves’ Creek’
(a name that was also suggestively applied to a creek at Wainfleet in this era), and in consequence an armed
expedition was sent against the Ingoldmells pirates from Hull in the summer of 1577. This succeeded in
capturing a pirate vessel named the Elizabeth along with its captain Launcelot Grenewell and 16 others, as
well as a gentleman from Ingoldmells and two yeomen from Grimsby, who were charged with receiving
the stolen goods and supplying the pirates. Ten men were subsequently hanged at Hull as a result of all this.
In the post-medieval era, the remote creeks and minor havens of the Lincolnshire coast seem to have
been in notable decline, with many silting up and being lost, and this decline appears to have greatly assisted
official efforts against local piracy. Indeed, concern around piracy in the 17th century seems primarily to
have been aimed at the threat from foreign ships, whose attacks kept Lincolnshire ships in port and
disrupted trade. In July 1672, for example, during the Third Anglo–Dutch War, Colonel John Butler wrote
that the Lincolnshire coast was ‘now so infested with small privateers that our merchants dare not send a
vessel to sea’, and described how two ships delivering coals near Wainfleet and Ingoldmells were taken by
one of these. The local mariners had clearly not forgotten how to handle themselves, however, as a dozen
or so local men joined up with the seamen who had escaped the Dutch to give chase and they succeeded
in driving the privateer away, recapturing the two ships, and ensuring that that the Happy Entrance—a Boston
wine-ship that the privateer had been waiting for—successfully avoided falling into Dutch hands. A similar
situation occurred at Grainthorpe, where a coal ship forced to shore by Dutch privateers was protected
from plundering by the local inhabitants, who gathered on the beach and drove off the landing party!
Figure 10.4: The probable location of The Scabbed Lamb at Jackson’s Corner, a notorious smuggling inn—the
map here is based on the 1840s Tithe Maps of Ingoldmells, Winthorpe and Skegness.
40
The smugglers of the Lincolnshire coast
If piracy seems to have been in notable decline, aside from in times of warfare, the same cannot be said for
its close relation, smuggling, which was at its peak during the 18th and 19th centuries. There is some evidence
that, as the obscure creeks and inlets along the coast disappeared or came under official watch, smugglers
who had previously operated all down the coast shifted their attention to the larger ports like Boston, where
their activity could be more easily concealed. However, this is not to say that it ceased away from these
sites. Smugglers along the bulk of the coast often put out from the beaches and remaining creeks in small
boats and met larger smuggling ships out at sea, whilst inns along the coast, often located close to the dunes
or minor creeks, seem to have been key focal points in this era for smuggling operations. For example,
Joseph Lowe, keeper of the Scabbed Lamb Inn on the coast at the Skegness–Ingoldmells boundary, was
fined £1000 (£90,000 today) in 1834 for smuggling, his inn—like Ravenserodd, perhaps—being
subsequently eaten by the sea later in that century. Similarly, when alterations were made at The Vine at
Skegness in 1902, a skeleton wearing buttons bearing the Royal insignia was discovered; the man’s identity
is uncertain, but it is possible that he was a customs riding officer that disappeared in the earlier 19th century
and who met an unfortunate end having attempted to apprehend his quarry at Skegness!
Other key smuggling sites along the coast included Oliver’s Gap, Theddlethorpe, and the sandhills at
Mablethorpe, where a sand excavation undertaken by children close to the promenade at the beginning of
the 20th century uncovered a smuggled hogshead of tobacco that had been buried but never returned for.
The Book in Hand, Mablethorpe, and Crook Bank, Theddlethorpe, are two further places with links to
Lincolnshire’s smuggling past. It was here that John and George Bell attempted to get two officers in the
preventative service drunk in 1838 so that they could unload their smuggled goods just up the coast at
Theddlethorpe. One officer, John Gallagher, only pretended to drink, however, and then followed George
Bell back to the former Theddlethorpe Haven (‘The Old Gout’), where he found 30 men unloading
smuggled tobacco, spirits, cigars and eau de cologne! The encounter ended with the officer drawing his
cutlass and pistols and engaging the smugglers, who fled, leaving their goods behind.
Figure 10.5: The ‘Inn’ marked at Mablethorpe is the Book in Hand; the house where the smugglers were found was
located in the former haven at ‘The Old Gout’, seen here on the 1824 OS map when it was still filled with water
(Source: Ordnance Survey, 1824/Wikimedia Commons).
41
11 Fortress Lincolnshire? Landscapes of Defence and Warning
on the Lincolnshire Coast
Introduction
The coastline between Grimsby and Boston is nowadays around 60 miles (100km) long and was even longer
in the Late Roman to early medieval period, when it was studded by wide tidal inlets and tempting estuarine
rivers—as such, it is hardly surprising that this landscape has traces of multiple efforts over the centuries
to protect it from external enemies.
Roman defences
Although the two surviving Roman walled forts of eastern Lincolnshire at Caistor and Horncastle lie well
inland from the coast, there are good reasons to think that the town of ‘Old Skegness’—swallowed by the
tide in the 1500s and probably located out to sea from Skegness pier—may well have been a third Late
Roman walled site. This town would probably have acted as both a terminus for a ferry across the Wash
from Norfolk and as a northern extension of the Saxon Shore Fort system, designed to protect the
hinterland of the Roman provincial capital at Lincoln. Likewise, it is noteworthy that Roman finds from
the Skegness area include both a Late Roman prick spur and a gold coin, both find-types being considered
indicative of the presence of the Late Roman army. Whether there were more defended sites northwards
along the coast is uncertain, but cases have been made for Late Roman earthwork forts at Yarburgh, near
Louth, and Cun Hu Hill, near Grimsby.
Anglo-Saxon and Viking defence
Place-names located down the coastline of
Lindsey may reflect the presence of Anglo-
Saxon/Viking-era defensive systems here,
designed to protect the coast from the sea-
raiders and invaders. The names of interest
here primarily involve Old English tōt,
‘lookout place’, and are found all along the
pre-Viking coast and overlooking it, as are
several names involving OE burh,
‘fortress’. The clearest example is Toote
Hill, or the ‘lookout-hill’, Little Coates,
near Grimsby. Quarried away in the 19th
and early 20th centuries, this once stood
50–100ft high with a trench encompassing
its summit and was located on a low clay
promontory jutting out into the coastal
marshes. There was also a *tōtærnhyll, ‘look-
out house hill’, at Cleethorpes, presumably
located atop the high cliff here—the only
cliffs on the Lincolnshire coast. Other
‘Toot’ names are found in the area of
Tetney, Boston, East Keal, Tattershall and
perhaps Gunby/Bratoft, while the parish-
names Tothill and Toynton may well both
contain Old English tōt. It is interesting to
note that the ‘look-out’ place-names are
very much coastal, whereas the ‘fortress’
names are less so and show in many cases
a close link with Anglo-Saxon road system.
Figure 11.1: The distribution of Old English tōt (red) and burh (yellow)
names in Lincolnshire; note that the tōt names have a clearly coastal
distribution, which is of considerable interest, whilst burh (‘fortification’)
names are found both at the coast and inland. (Underlying modern
mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open
Database Licence).
42
Castles and beacons in the medieval and post-medieval periods
There are several medieval castles located either in or on the edge of the coastal zone. Castle Carlton, Toot
Hill (in Tothill), Castle Hill (Welton le Marsh), and King’s Hill (Wrangle) all seem to be Norman earthwork
castles, the first two having been recently re-dated to the late 11th century. Whilst it has been suggested that
they are unlikely to have been intended for coastal defence and instead reflect elite display, it is worth noting
that a reconsideration of the sites
suggests that they all probably had
good views of the coastline, and the
name of Toot Hill suggests a
defensive function at some point
here. In addition to these, there may
have been a castle at the drowned
haven town of Skegness, based on
medieval and 16th-century references
to one, and both of the major ports
of Grimsby and Boston seem to
have been equipped with earthen
defences during the medieval
period—Boston is, in fact, called a
fort, rather than a town, by one mid-
12th-century Arabic geographer who
seems to have had good knowledge
of the Lincolnshire coast!
Such fortifications, whether
meant primarily for defence from
coastal raids or even just having the
potential for this as one of several
Figure 11.2: The destruction of Toote Hill, Little Coates. A photograph taken in 1903, showing the hill in the process of
being quarried away (Source: Walter Johnson, Byways in British Archaeology (Cambridge, 1912), Internet Archive).
Figure 11.3: Lidar image of the area around Castle Carlton, Toot Hill and Castle
Hill, Withern (a possible 12th-century earthwork), adjusted to show the remains
of these sites and the low-lying areas of the Outmarsh (© Environment Agency
2021, Open Government Licence v3.0).
43
functions, were probably supplemented by a network of coastal warning beacons, just as the Anglo-Saxon
forts were by ‘Toot Hills’. Various local place-names, some dating back to at least the 14th century, involve
the word ‘beacon’ or ‘firebeacon’, and these—like the tōt names—have a decidedly coastal distribution that
spreads up onto the Wolds, presumably to enable communication with inland forces. In addition, there are
also more uncertain earthworks and possible fortifications dotted along the coast that may have seen use
in this era, including the medieval moated precursor of Mablethorpe Hall, which was given a licence to
erect fortifications and stone walls due to its position ‘on the sea coast’ in 1459.
By the Napoleonic War, in the early 19th century, the main coastal defence was once again a system of
beacons, updated to involve signals and flags, and supplemented by inland military forces (Volunteer Corps)
who could react to these. Furthermore, plans were made to evacuate the citizenry of Grimsby, for example,
in carts if the enemy landed, destroying what infrastructure they could behind them. In 1803, when the
beacon system was tested for intervisibility, guns were fired from the Signal Stations at Cleethorpes cliff
and Saltfleet harbour, with first flags raised and then, after nightfall, the beacons lit, and an analysis suggests
that claims that a beacon at Seacroft, Skegness, could communicate with Lincoln via only the single
intermediary beacon on the Wolds at Nab Hill, Fulletby, are probably correct. The issue with this system
was, of course, the potential for false alarms from fires set accidentally or otherwise, and in April 1804 those
doing so deliberately were warned that they would be prosecuted ‘with the utmost rigour of the law’, as the
false alarms and consequent call-outs for the Volunteers Corps were causing ‘much inconvenience’!
The First and Second World Wars
The most notable upgrades to the coastal defences date from the First and especially the Second World
Wars. The former saw the foundation of the two great Humber Mouth forts, Haile Sand Fort and Bull Sand
Fort, in 1915, although they were completed too late to be much use in that conflict, as well as a partial
system of coastal concrete pillboxes, with the surviving remnants of these concentrated mainly around
Saltfleet to Donna Nook. In addition, several air bases were established, the most notable and long-lived
of which was at RAF North Coates, and cavalry and cyclist units were deployed along the coast, at Skegness,
Figure 11.4: (a) Distribution map of castles and other possible medieval defensive sites along the Lincolnshire coastline, along
with potential early beacon sites. (b) Distribution map of recorded Napoleonic-era beacons, signals and signal stations (open
symbols indicate possible signal sites), along with the earlier beacon sites; note, some of the early beacon sites and ‘Toot hills’
seem to have been reused as part of the Napoleonic and later system, and others probably were too. (Modern mapping ©
OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence)
44
Burgh-le-Marsh, Sutton-on-Sea, Chapel St Leonards and Grimsby. An Army base was also established at
Humberston Fitties, with the huts they put up there forming the basis of the chalet camp that has flourished
there since 1919.
The changes wrought by the Second World War were far more extensive, with a ‘Coastal Crust’ of anti-
invasion devices, including pillboxes, gun emplacements, mines and anti-tank cubes, found all along the
seaboard from Grimsby to Boston. Key coastal artillery batteries were established at Grimsby Docks,
Theddlethorpe (Crook Bank), Mablethorpe, Ingoldmells (Jacksons Corner), Gibraltar Point and Freiston
Shore, and mobile train-mounted artillery was also provided. Although most airbases were inland of the
Lincolnshire coastal marshes, there were two in the Outmarsh at North Coates and nearby Donna Nook,
and there were a significant number of radar stations established along the coast too, whilst the farmland
of the Outmarsh was criss-crossed by anti-aircraft trenches. Although much of this infrastructure and
defence architecture has been removed or decommissioned in the post-war era, involving significant effort
in terms of the Coastal Crust by the County Council after 1945, large elements continue to persist along
the northern Lincolnshire coast and can still be seen on beach visits today, as can the Humber forts.
Figure 11.6: (a) The distribution of elements of the Second World War ‘coastal crust’ along the Lincolnshire coastal zone,
showing the 3m contour inland of the Outmarsh/Low Grounds (Underlying modern mapping © OpenStreetMap contributors,
available under the Open Database Licence). (b) A First Word War pillbox at Sea Lane, Saltfleet, probably built in 1917; at the
outbreak of the Second World War, the pillbox was reoccupied and integrated into the new anti-invasion defence (C. R. Green).
Figure 11.5: The two great Humber Mouth forts, Bull Sand Fort (left) and Haile Sand Fort (right), with Spurn Point in the
background; begun in 1915, they were completed too late to be of much use in the First World War but were used in World War
Two (C. R. Green).
12 Inns on the Edge and the Landscape of the Lincolnshire Coast
Introduction
The inns and alehouses of the Lincolnshire coastline are of considerable interest from a landscape history
perspective. Some of them, especially the more ancient, seem to reflect the landscape of creeks and ports
that existed here before the 17th century, whilst others actually played an important and decisive role in
shaping the subsequent resort landscape of the coastal strip that still exists today.
Reflecting the landscape: ports and the earliest ‘Inns on the Edge’
Inns and other drinking establishments are first recorded in the Lincolnshire coastal zone during the
medieval period. In Boston, for example, several people had surnames like Taverner and Typeler in the
taxation returns of 1327, 1332 and 1340. These names likely indicate their occupations as tavern-owners
and ale-sellers/tapsters, as surnames were not yet fully hereditary. The records of foreign residents in late
medieval England also show brewers from Holland living in Boston in the 1430s–50s, including one named
Nicholas Johnson and another named Peter Taillour. In Grimsby, meanwhile, there is the documented case
of Robert de Eynesham, a burgess and tavern-keeper of Grimsby, who escaped from prison in the late 14th
century and so found his way into the medieval records. Of course, it is not surprising that taverns and
tavern-keepers existed in the major medieval ports of Lincolnshire. Boston was very wealthy in this
period—it was the main port for the shipping of wool, England’s most important export, and its overseas
trade was second only to London, where the evils of the port’s taverns were being complained of as early
as the 12th century! Some of the oldest recorded inns in Boston included the Red Lion Tavern in Bargate,
first mentioned in 1515, and the Crown in the Market-place (1516). Other inn-names from 16th century
Boston include the Ram, the Bell, the White Hart, the Saracen’s Head, the White Horse, the Rose, and the
Sword (all mentioned in 1564). Whether
these inns were in existence prior to the
16th century is, of course, uncertain, but it
seems very likely that at least some, if not
the majority, of them were.
The smaller Lincolnshire ports likely
had their own inns and ale-house in the
later Middle Ages and Early Modern era
too. The best evidence for this comes
from the medieval court rolls of
Ingoldmells Manor, which covered the
southern Lincolnshire Marsh and Old
Skegness, a former ‘great haven town’ and
‘a good port’. These court rolls mention
many brewers/brewsters and tipplers—
ale-sellers/alehouse-keepers, who sold ale
but did not brew it—who had broken the
‘assize of beer/ale’, a set of rules about
the quality, prices and measures to be
used. For example, in April 1313, there
were two tipplers and twenty-one
brewsters in court, whilst in May 1346,
there were eleven tipplers and sixteen
people who had ‘brewed and sold beer
contrary to the assize’. Sometimes we
know where these ale-sellers lived within
the manor, such as Robert May of
Skegness, who was in court with three
Figure 12.1: The distribution of inns and alehouses along the Lincolnshire
coast in 1686, based on the proxy measure of spare beds and stabling
places (red), mapped against the recorded 16th- to 17th-century ports and
havens. The background map shows both roads recorded on maps of the
17th to mid-18th centuries and the 18th-century coastline.
46
others for ‘tippling of beer’ in April 1343, or Robert Ffoular Jnr and four others, who were presented to
the court by Skegness for brewing and selling bear contrary to the assize in October 1374. It is also
interesting that some of these ale-sellers, such as John son of Alan and two others in October 1345, were
in trouble ‘because they had no signs for selling beer’, which suggests that this was expected, as it was also
for the wife of Robert Herryson in July 1419, who was brought up for being unwilling to ‘expose the sign
called Alestake’.
The ports and havens of the Lincolnshire coastline were in a state of serious decline by the 17th century.
However, the Spare Beds and Stabling Survey of 1686, which gives information about the number of these
available in inns and alehouses across England and Wales, reveals a continuing strong correlation between
the locations of inns and the medieval/post-medieval ports of the coastal zone. Mapping these shows that
the four largest concentrations of inns and alehouses along the Lincolnshire coastal zone are located in just
those four places—Boston, Grimsby, Saltfleet and Wainfleet—where the most important late medieval and
early post-medieval ports and havens were situated, whilst no significant inns/alehouses are recorded from
the area of Skegness, which is expected given the loss of the port to the sea here in the 16th century.
Moreover, the smaller concentrations of spare beds and stabling places also match up well with the known
minor 16th- to 17th-century ports and havens of the coastline. So, there are inns at North Somercotes,
Theddlethorpe, Old Leake and Fishtoft among other places, all of which had active creeks and havens
nearby, but none at Huttoft, Anderby or Sutton, for example, which did not. In other words, the evidence
of the Spare Beds and Stabling Survey of 1686 strongly suggests that the distribution of the more important
inns and alehouses along the 17th-century Lincolnshire coastal zone closely reflected the locations of the
recorded ports and havens of this region (which in turn had an intimate connection to the former great
creeks of the medieval and earlier coastal marshes).
Creating the landscape: bathing inns and the origins of the resort coastline
Whilst the earliest ‘Inns on the Edge’ seem to have ultimately reflected the landscapes that had existed all
along this coastline from the medieval period through to the 17th century, some of those that came
afterwards appear to have played a central role in creating a wholly new landscape in this region. The key
inns here are the Georgian bathing inns of the 18th and earlier 19th centuries, which were established at
Skirbeck, Boston Scalp/Fishtoft, Freiston, Skegness, Ingoldmells, Sutton, Mablethorpe, Saltfleet and
Figure 12.2: Detail of Saltfleet Haven, showing the probable area of the documented late medieval to early modern harbour and
staithe (landing-stage or wharf) and the position of the inns recorded by 1792 in relation to this, along with Lidar information
regarding land elevation. ‘The Coal Green’, which lay to the south of the harbour, may indicate the area where colliers once
beached to unload their cargoes prior to the mid-17th century. Contains Lidar data © Environment Agency 2021, Open
Government Licence v3.0, and OS Six Inch mapping, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland.
47
Cleethorpes. These establishments were often well-appointed inns, designed to cater for the wealthier,
genteel elements of society who wished to partake of the new fashion of sea-bathing. For example,
Cleethorpes, where the Dolphin Inn/Cleethorpes Hotel was founded around 1760, was declared in 1805
to be ‘the resort of much genteel company, it being universally allowed to be the most eligible and agreeable
bathing place on the Lincolnshire coast’. Similarly, Skegness—where the Vine was established in about
1772 and the ‘New Hotel’/Hildred’s by 1792—was declared in 1779 to be ‘a Place very much resorted to
by Ladies and Gentlemen for Sea Bathing, where there is a safe and convenient Shore’.
Bathing inns seem to have formed the seeds from which a wholly new urban and resort landscape grew
up along the coastal strip of Lincolnshire. Where previously, there were only thinly dispersed settlements
or hamlets, by the mid-19th century small resorts had started to emerge. At Cleethorpes, there was only
really the hamlet of Oole, with a single bathing inn—The Dolphin—and two or three lodging houses, at
the start of the 19th century, but by the 1850s two further bathing inns and 106 lodging houses had been
established here and the resort was catering for over a thousand visitors at a time. At Mablethorpe, there
was very little by the sea where the town centre is now in the early 19th century other than The Book in
Hand inn, which was established by 1792 and known at first as the Mablethorpe Hotel or Sign of the Castle.
However, by the middle of the century a small resort had likewise grown up around this inn, with several
new inns and beerhouses established at Mablethorpe by the late 1860s. In July 1855, the place was said to
be ‘full of visitors to overflowing’, and several thousand visitors arrived on a single day in 1871. Turning to
Skegness, there seems to have been little more than a small hamlet here with a scattering of surrounding
settlements prior to the establishment of two eighteenth-century bathing inns in the parish, the original
town having been washed away in the 16th century. Although it was still referred to as a ‘retired watering
place’ and ‘free from bustle’ in 1866, Skegness was by then already developing into a significant resort—in
1861, 3,000 attended the races here, and in 1859 more than a hundred children from one of the Burgh
schools apparently ‘had a glorious day at the sea-side, spent in cricketing, donkey-riding and other appetite-
getting fun’.
Figure 12.3: (a) The distribution of coastal inns licensed in the Lindsey Quarter Sessions alehouse recognizances of the 1790s; the
map shows the number recorded from each parish and settlement in the area from Cleethorpes to Friskney, including those
licensed in settlements on the edge of the Middle Marsh. (b) The 18th- and early 19th-century bathing inns and places along the
coastline of Lincolnshire and the 19th-century railway network; yellow stars indicate sites recorded pre-1800, pink pre-1850.
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Not every Georgian bathing inn led to the development of a small
resort—inns offering river-bathing failed to find a lasting audience,
whilst the bathing inns at Freiston Shore (the Coach &
Horses/Plummers and the Marine) and Saltfleet (the New Inn) fell out
of favour at least in part because of saltmarsh growth and the
construction of sea-banks that created a barrier between them and the
waters. Those that ultimately grew to be towns also had the advantage
of being connected to the railway network—Saltfleet and Freiston both
missed out on this, and suffered as a result, whilst Cleethorpes got its
railway in 1863, Skegness in 1873, and Mablethorpe in 1877. However,
whilst undoubtedly significant, not least in inspiring local landowners
and others to invest in these new towns, it is worth noting that the
connection to the railway network was itself influenced by the proven
and continuing popularity of Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe and Skegness
with bathers and tourists prior to the railways arriving. Given that this
mid-19th-century popularity seems to have ultimately had its roots in
the establishment of the bathing inns here, there would thus seem to
be a credible argument for seeing these ‘new inns’ as having had a
crucial role in the creation of the modern Lincolnshire coastal
landscape that continues to predominate into the 21st century.
Figure 12.5: The built landscape of Cleethorpes parish—(a) The four hamlets in the early 19th century, along with the two 18th-
century inns; (b) the growth of Cleethorpes to c. 1900, with pubs and bathing inns founded up to c. 1850; (c) Cleethorpes in the
1950s; (d) Cleethorpes in the 2020s (Base map: OS Six Inch 1909, National Library of Scotland).
Figure 12.4: Skegness in 1779 (Source:
© The British Library Board, British
Library Maps K.Top.19.19.5 tab.end).
Text and illustrations copyright © Caitlin R. Green, 2023.