Taking stock

The crocus is flowering

I moved to Lincolnshire just over a year ago, in December 2013, having lived all my life on the outskirts of London.  I'd intended to blog my way through the experience, and I did make the odd post here and there, but I think I needed time to assimilate what had happened to me.

Usually when people move, they have some link to the place that they have chosen, whether that is a family link of a link to a new job or just a desire to live there for some reason.  My reasons were entirely practical:  I needed to find a place where I could afford a house, where we were near to transport but had the normal things, shops and doctors in walking distance.  I approached the search like a job, having been let go at the end of a monthly contract I had the time to search while at the same time looking for somewhere to live.

Initially I looked at places closer to London.  My son's girlfriend's father was in hospital in London and likely to stay there and so we needed good transport links to London for her, and of course my family still lives around Uxbridge and Hertfordshire (mostly) and so I wanted to be able to travel back to see them.

I collated the houses in my price range, with the number of bedrooms I needed, with a small garden, close to a station, with shops in walking distance, and haunted Zoopla and Right Move and estate agents' websites.  I compiled secret boards on Pinterest, afraid that if I posted them to my public boards someone would swoop in and gazump me before I'd had a chance to visit and view.

I fell in love with a house in the Lincolnshire fens, which had virtually none of the things I said I was asking for, but which I loved dearly, but head governed heart when a report showed that the walls were gradually parting company with each other and would need a lot of remedial work.  I might have been tempted if it had been close to a station or good coach route, but the half hour bus ride to the nearest town was the clincher.  And so I continued to look.

I must admit that it wasn't love at first sight when I saw this house, but its resemblance to the house I had loved made me want to see it, and once I had walked through the door, and especially once I had seen the garden, I was hooked.

A year on, I have found a few things to dislike.  There seems to be coal ash in the vegetable garden, which is not very healthy, and I must put in raised beds or use pots for growing things, and had to allow my prize marrows and sweetcorn to rot.  The central heating was not very efficient and terribly expensive to run, and I have replaced it with a modern boiler and taken out the ugliest fireplace in the world and replaced it with another radiator.

But in general, I have found a house I can love, and can forgive the damp in the bedrooms and the cracks in the plaster.  I once heard Lucinda Lambton say that she kissed the walls of her house in Berkshire beause she loved it so much.  This is the first time I have felt that way about a house I've lived in.

The countryside around the town is beautiful, I love the wolds and the little villages.  It's a pleasure to drive out and find mysteriously winding roads.  I didn't look at the countryside much when I viewed the house, because we travelled from the A1 and most of the way it is fairly flat and uninteresting, it's only as you pass through Market Rasen that the wolds begin to undulate and the landscape which looks so English and so untouched comes into view.

There's so much more sky, and the weather changes fast.  The air is crystal clear most of the time, although the large number of coal fires around the town make it a bit more dusty in the winter, something that I blamed on my own coal fire until I took it out and found the black dust is still the same.  There is a sharpness to the air which you simply don't get in London, except on rare autumn mornings when the cold of dawn burns off with the sun.  The wind that I was warned about does sweep in off the Lincoln plain, but the weather is often warmer and dryer here than forecast for the rest of the country.

I've started to look in the right place on weather maps - the habit of looking to the west of London is hard to break - and I've started to think of myself as a member of this town.  Everything seemed so familiar the first time I came here.  There are places in South London which seem entirely alien to me, even though I have lived in and around London for so long.  But this place seems like home.

I did what everyone told me to do, and waited to make changes to the house or the garden, to find out what lurks in the garden borders and to work out what I would like to do with the house.  The garden has a lot of bulbs in it, and these are breaking through for the second time since I moved... crocus and snowdrops are flowering already and the first signs of spring propelled me out of the front door to prune the roses before it was too late yesterday.

I've not really embedded into the community yet.  I volunteered for a few weeks at the Air Ambulance shop, but felt I was wasting my time, doing something which many volunteers could do instead of using my talents.  I offered to put things on ebay, or to paint and renovate the things they were throwing away, but they declined, and making the odd dash to London was very inconvenient for everyone, as they couldn't rely on me being there.  So I stopped.  I've volunteered for the business improvement group, (now disbanded) and joined the rail user group.  The people here seem very kind and open.  When we stayed in Tealby shortly before we moved, everyone warned us that shopping would take longer in Market Rasen because everyone is so friendly, and that's true.

So... this is a new start, a new year, spring is starting to shoot, and I will try to blog more regularly than I have.

Romans in Lincolnshire

"TimeTeam2007" by Original uploader was Bedoyere at en.wikipedia Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

On a whim, and as an antidote to the very boring videos I have been having to watch in learning about search engine optimization, I searched for Time Team videos set in Lincolnshire.  I barely expected to find anything, because I am so used to there being a blank where Lincolnshire should be in any list or directory, but there were several Time Team episodes set in Lincolnshire.

Season eight has an Anglo-saxon cemetary in Lincolnshire, season nine has Ancaster on Ermine street in Lincolnshire.

Then there's Wickenby which was episode four in season 15.  Wickenby is about five miles from Market Rasen, and the episode I watched covered a dig there.  There appeared to be both Iron Age and Roman remains in the field in Wickenby, and interest in the site was partially aroused by metal detecting finds on the site - lots and lot of brooches and coins and stuff, including a marvellous metal bowl.

Tony Robinson appeared to be surprised that the Romans had penetrated rural Lincolnshire, as though it were shocking that they had deviated from the Ermine Way, the roman road which goes through Lincoln on its way to the north, but actually there are a lot of Roman remains in this part of Lincolnshire.  Three Roman kilns have been found in Market Rasen, and there have been a lot of finds in Osgodby, which is north of Market Rasen.

It was interesting to learn that not a lot is known yet about these smaller places - most of the finds for Roman Britain are within the context of the larger towns and forts which the Romans lost no time in erecting around the country.   Smaller places, where, it was suggested, the Roman way of life may have arrived and affected the way in which the native lived their lives, without an accompanying Roman population, are much less known.  It made me wonder if the recycling which the team thought was happening at the site (metal and stone) was actually being done to take advantage of the new market which the Roman invasion was offering - as they seemed to be of the opinion that the site was in use quite soon after the invasion in the first century AD.

It made me want to go and dig up the back garden, although I controlled that impulse.  Not only has the ground here been very disturbed because the house and garden have been in use for 160 years, but the weather is nippy and the ground is pretty hard at this time of year.  Archaeology is definitely a summer activity.

I was very disappointed when I visited the local museum at Lincoln, because I wanted to gain a clear picture of the history of Lincolnshire, and they seemed to have been diverted by the addition to the national curriculum by Egypt and invasion forces into including an overall history of the country and not a specific history of Lincolnshire or Lincoln.  Those things that were in the cabinets, stone age tools and other finds, were very poorly labelled with information.

It seems as though the history of the period of Roman invasion and settlement is not very well understood from a domestic and small-scale settlement point of view.  In the programme the Roman expert Guy de la Bedoyere suggested that a lot more will become known about these things in future years, but that little was known about it at present.

I visited his web site, which has qute a lot about the different legions which served in the Roman army, and about where they were stationed.   He is now working as a teacher at Sleaford.

Parchment fan

I went for a quick look in the charity shops this afternoon.  I found a couple of display cases for pipes, which I bought for John's collection of clay pipes, from the Salvation Army, and a rather wonderful parchment fan in the Age UK shop.

It is pierced, gilded and painted with coloured inks.  It looks old to me, and some of the coloured inks on the parchment are faded, but I can find very little aboout parchment fans online that isn't modern.  I've emailed the V and A to see what they can tell me, and will have to wait and see.  Meanwhile, here's a picture.

Market Rasen: blue bin blues

I saw someone piling a vast quantity of plastic into their blue bin this morning.  Sheet plastic isn't recyclable and shouldn't go in the blue bin.  Now, having moved from another area, where the rules are different, I'm the first to admit that it can be difficult to work out what goes in which bin.  But I'm very unclear about the etiquette if one sees a neighbour filling the recycling bin with non recyclables.  Do I rush out and tell him, like a busybody?  Or would that be the neighbourly thing to do?  Too late, I've missed my chance and he's gone inside again.

I only recently learned that to be a good recycler, you should ensure that card and foil isn't contaminated with food residue, and bottles are properly washed out and clean.   You shouldn't just toss that shampoo bottle into the recycling bin - wash it out first.  And if there are food particles adhering to that pizza box, put it in the black bin and not the blue.

Recycling in Market Rasen is very different from Hillingdon Borough.  They accept aerosols, tetrapaks, plastics marked 1 and 2, as well as the normal glass, card, paper and tins and cans.  I discovered that they have a handy A-Z guide that tells you which bin to put things in.

They also have a recycling centre on the industrial estate, which takes a lot of stuff in addition - textiles, batteries, oil, soil, wood, gas cylinders, with very helpful staff (although they guard their always largely empty staff car park aggressively). 

Restaurant review: The Advocate Arms, Market Rasen

Normally when I have dined somewhere, I come home and post a review on Trip Advisor.  I'm not doing that this time - I'm really fed up with them since they allowed someone to use my BT email address to set up an account and seem to be unwilling to fix that.  So I'm going to write my review here.

The Advocate Arms has a slightly forbidding exterior, mainly caused by the weird single person revolving door which propels you into a no man's land: in front of the bar, between the restaurant and the cafe, not sure which way is up.  I've been here a few times now, so we know where things are.

We were asked to go and have a drink at the bar before being taken to our table, something that several of the restaurants in Market Rasen seem to like to ask patrons to do.  It always seems a bit odd to me... in London most restaurants (unless you are having to wait for a table to be free)
will take your drinks order when you are at the table and have the menu.  We sat in the bar and ordered a drink, but had to move to our table almost the second our drinks were delivered.

The restaurant was a bit warm and sticky, and the busiest I have ever seen it.  Despite this, the service was spot on, with waiters and waitresses appearing at regular intervals.  The food was delicious.  I ordered the citrus-cured sea trout as a starter, my companion the marinated duck breast and both were very well presented and tasted gorgeous. 

As a main course I chose the roast chicken supreme, which was delightful.  It was presented on a bed of Lincolnshire Poacher potato, with parma ham crisps and buttered green vegetables and I savoured every mouthful.  My companion had the calves liver, which was very good indeed, he reported.

For pudding we both chose the Strawberry and Champagne panna cotta, which came with sorbet and strawberry terrine and little meringue buttons.  It was perfect, it enhanced the delicate flavours of the fruit and wasn 't too sweet.  I loved it.  With two aperitifs, a bottle of prosecco, a bottle of sparkling mineral water and two coffees, the whole meal came to around £60.  The Advocate have a special offer on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday which is a bargain at £13.95 for two courses or £16.95 for three.

If I have any complaint at all, it's a tiny nit-picking one:  the restaurant uses local produce which it labels as "Lincolnshire" this and that.  If they are as careful about sourcing their ingredients as the food preparation indicates, it would be nice to have more detail about where the meat and fish come from, on the menu.

Other than that, it was an extremely enjoyable meal, at a bargain price -what more could you want? For Trip advisor one usually marks a restaurant out of five, and I have no hesitation in awarding the Advocate five stars for my meal this evening. 

The old gas works house

My house used to be the old gas works house, the place where the manager for the gasworks lived until the end of the 1960s.  I've been trying to find out as much as I can about the history of the house since I moved in, but it is tricky - both the numbering for the street and the name of the house has changed a few times in the course of 164 years.

At the auction last week I bought an aerial view of the town which was a still from a Grimsby Evening Telegraph.  I'm not sure of the date, but it shows my house, the garden before the end of it was sold off, and the Gasometer.  It isn't where I was told it used to be (at this time, anyway).  It seems to be where the doctor's surgery around the corner is.  The area beside the house which is now filled with a row of houses, seems to have been barren and fronted with a hoarding.

There have actually only been three private owners of the house, despite its age.  The Market Rasen Gas and Lighting company built it, and the companies which owned it changed names fairly regularly over the course of the years until gas was nationalized and the house became one of the assets.  Then in the late sixties, the house was sold into private ownership and between them and me there are only the people I bought it from.

I thought that Market Rasen was a relatively new town, as most of the visible architecture in the town is Victorian, which certainly seems to have been the most prosperous time for the town.  I remember a friend telling me that there is a very curious division in Totnes of the new town and the old town, with the much older houses having survived in the poor end of town because they couldn't afford to replace them, while the old houses in the rich end of town were all torn down and replaced.  Maybe that's what went on here:  the town became prosperous int he 1850s and so all the buildings were replaced in short order. 

Of course, I know there are some much older buildings in and around Market Rasen, but a lot of what can be seen dates from then.  However, I've discovered that there were roman potteries in Market Rasen, and anglo-saxon gold has been found in fields near the town.  It's curious to me that the town barely seems to have grown in all the time since it was founded, whereas other towns around the wolds have expanded. 

I need to see if I can find information about what was here before the 1850s... although it is likely that the street was called something different, as I presume the name Chapel Street came from the building of the massive Methodist chapel in 1852. 

Watkinson Clay Pipe Factory in Market Rasen

George Spencer Watkinson was the builder of the Market Rasen Clay pipe factory, which he built in 1843.  The factory made clay smoking pipes in a variety of designs and was very successful from the 1840s to 1893, when the introduction of wooden pipes began to make clay pipes obsolete. 


What makes the Watkinson factory unique is that George Spencer Watkinson's son of the same name, made a journal of his memories of the factory, including a number of naive sketches of the processes in the making of clay pipes.  In general, there is very little known or written about the operation of clay pipe factories, and so to have the record made by George Spencer Watkinson junior is very special.  The illustrations from his journal are not of good quality, but they offer more information for the Market Rasen factory than can be found anywhere else.  A short biography of George Spencer Watkinson junior and some copies of his illustrations are included in the booklet Market Rasen in the eighteen fifties.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, clay pipes were provided by pubs to their clientele.  The customers would break off the end of the pipe, and then fill it with tobacco and smoke it, returning it to the pipe stand for the next person to use.  Thus it is that clay pipes are usually discovered with short or none existent stems, even when the bowls survive.  They were disposable.

Each clay pipe factory would produce their own designs, sometimes with the name of the manufacturer or the place where they were made, inscribed on the pipes.  Some of the pipes made at Market Rasen are plain, but many of them have "Watkinson - Rasen" or "Market Raisin" or "Market Rasen"  on them.

Some of the decorated designs show a trophy, maybe a racing trophy?  Others show acorns and oak leaves, or geometric designs.  Some of the rarest are anti-slavery pipes, showing a slave in chains on one side, and Liberty, a standing female in Greek dress, on the reverse.