Wellingore

The area of Lincolnshire where my sister lives could not be more different from my own Yorkshire home area. I love exploring its fields and villages. The buildings are an interesting mix. Some are made of the local limestone, some are mellowed old brick, mostly with lovely terracotta pantile roofs. Many of them have pretty little gable windows in the roof. There is a lot of new building, though some of the houses are so skilfully blended in that you can't really tell their age. In fact, nearby, there is one whole village that has been built quite recently and it really looks like it's been there for centuries. Nowadays, there are a lot of modern executive developments too, which are generally a bit less imaginative.

I found this medieval stepped cross in the village of Wellingore (below). It would originally have had a cross head on the shaft but many of them were destroyed by iconoclasts in the 16th and 17th centuries. It may have acted as a boundary marker or a market cross. They are sometimes called butter crosses.

There is also a windmill in Wellingore, though its sails and cap were lost and the tower is now part of a private house. The base is 18th century and the upper layers were added in the 1850s. It was defunct by 1945. Windmills were common in the area at one time. Before she moved to a bungalow, my sister lived for many years in a mill house, though the adjacent windmill had long since been demolished.