92 Lincolnshire Notes & Queries. 



and clover. What perhaps most strikes the observer is the 

 absence of houses or farmsteads, for the wold villages as a rule 

 lie hid away in hollows of the hills or along the main lines of 

 traffic through the valleys, and at the best it is even now a 

 thinly populated district compared with the rest of the county. 

 North-east towards the Humber the wold breaks away through 

 the Gap (the scene of a sharp cavalry skirmish between a 

 detachment of the Newark garrison and the Parliamentarian 

 horse), beyond the ancient oak and beech of Riby Park and 

 pleasant Aylesby, of shorthorn fame, with the fertile middle 

 marsh merging into the rich pastures of the maritime plain ; 

 there softened by distance, rises the graceful water tower, 300 

 feet high, towering above the blue smoke haze of Grimsby 

 like a Florentile campanile, and marking the entrance to the 

 Royal Dock ; beyond this the broad estuary of the river, Spurn 

 Point and Dimlington high land, and on the outmost verge 

 the silver sheen of the North Sea. Turning south, where the 

 wold dips steeply to the central plain, we see the red-tiled 

 houses and grey church tower of Caistor nestling in a hollow 

 of the hills, with half the county spread out like a map, field 

 succeeding field, with infinite shades of yellow, brown, and 

 green, mingled with pinewood, coppice, and hedgerow timber, 

 league beyond league to where on the blue horizon, like a 

 great rock, rises the stately pile of Remigius Lincoln 

 Minster. All honour to the great Lord Yarborough, great 

 great grandfather to the present earl, who with a lavish 

 expenditure, and aided by an enterprising tenantry, changed the 

 barren wastes into the garden of England, and who, as the 

 inscription on the pillar in the neighbouring wood states, 

 between 1787 and 1823 planted 12,552,700 trees on his 

 estates. 



Take again the view from the heath road south of Lincoln, 

 above Boothby-Graffbe, looking west across Somerton Castle 

 and the level district round Newark to the furthest bounds of 

 Nottinghamshire ; southward in one broad curve sweeps the 

 wooded escarpment, mile beyond mile to Grantham, the 

 graceful spires of frequent churches marking the position of 

 each cliff village, till the oolite cliff becomes merged into that 

 lias ridge from which the lordly towers of Belvoir overlook the 

 wide vale of Trent. Still keeping our position, but facing 

 eastward, we overlook the breadth of Lincoln Heath, where 

 the finest barley is grown and the largest sheep are reared. In 

 the foreground Dunstan Pillar, a lighthouse on land, built in 



