Petwood Hotel

Whilst I was staying with my sister in Lincolnshire, we went for a leisurely stroll around the little town of Woodhall Spa. It grew up in the 1800s, when a plan to sink a coal mine instead revealed mineral-rich spring waters, leading to the town's development as a healing spa. It's very attractive and has some interesting independent shops, including a great secondhand bookshop, where we spent quite a while browsing.

We also went for a coffee on the garden terrace of the Petwood Hotel, in the town. Its award-winning, restored gardens are beautifully kept and well-used for weddings and other events.





The hotel has an interesting history. It was built as a country house for a wealthy heiress, Baroness Grace Van Eckhardstein, in the early 1900s, after a painful divorce. She wanted a retreat, located in her favourite wood or 'pet wood'. Built in an elaborate Tudor/Jacobean style, it has lavish details such as beautiful oak panelling and a hand-carved staircase. She lived there, eventually with her second husband, although during WWI it served as a military hospital. Returned to private use after the war, it became a hotel in 1933.




At the beginning of WWII it became a base for RAF officers, notably of 617 Squadron, the famous Dambusters. They were a top-secret squadron entrusted, among other things, with the destruction of three German dams in the Ruhr, which was achieved in 1943 using the innovative Barnes-Wallis 'bouncing bomb'. The Petwood Hotel is now full of RAF memorabilia and tributes.

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.

Harvest time

I spent a few days with my sister, who lives in a village just south of Lincoln. It's an agricultural area with a patchwork of large arable fields, where the farmers were busy with the harvest. My uncle, whose business supplies lime to farmers, was saying they have been very concerned by the weather this year (again). The run of wet weather we've had lately has come just at the wrong time, delaying the harvest and lowering the quality of the grain. Mind you, I don't suppose there are many years in our variable climate where the weather patterns really do favour farmers. 

The fields were full of stubble. Once the straw has dried it is baled up, these days into huge cylindrical bales that are lifted by spiked forks on tractors. When I was a young girl, I had a friend who lived on a farm and I used to like going to help with the work. In those days, straw bales were much smaller oblongs that I could just about lift by hand.

Most of the cornfield poppies seemed to be over. I just found a few in the field margins.

All Saints Church, Wellingore

The advantage of exploring rural villages is that their churches, unlike those in urban areas, are often left unlocked during the day. All Saints Church in Wellingore, Lincolnshire, stands proudly on the edge of the escarpment, its spire visible for quite a distance (and a useful location for a mobile phone mast!)  Like many of our rural churches it is Grade I listed so it must be considered of great historical interest, though I have seen many churches that appealed to me more.

It sits within a fair-sized graveyard and inside seems relatively light and bright as the majority of its windows are plain rather than stained glass. There has been a church on the site since Saxon times, and the existing building, with Norman origins but mostly 13th - 15th century, has been altered and expanded many times, undergoing a significant restoration around 1880.

The altar reredos (above) is relatively modern, a carved mahogany relief of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Last Supper', commissioned in 1969.

In contrast, the alabaster effigies (below) of a knight and his lady on a tomb chest are believed to date back to the 15th century. It is reputed to be Sir Richard de Buslingthorpe and his wife, Isabella. Over the years, the little animal at his feet has been stroked so much that it is wearing away! It may be his dog, but it is more likely to be a lion, a symbol of valour and nobility.

Lincolnshire villages

Our Lincolnshire walk took us through the villages of Navenby and Wellingore, which have a core of old, traditional houses as well as lots of newer builds. The beautiful house in my photo above is the Manor House on the Green, in Wellingore. It is a Grade II listed Georgian (early 18th century) house built in the local limestone with a pantile roof. The Green has an old water pump, as do some of the streets in the village, which is now a conservation area.

There is no shortage of attractive old buildings, mostly built of limestone but with a few built of mellow old bricks. It's all very pleasing.

Some of the street names are interestingly evocative of earlier times: Blacksmith's Lane and the oddly named Egg Shell Alley.

A Lincolnshire amble

My sister lives in rural Lincolnshire, on a ridge of high ground that runs south from the city of Lincoln. I visited recently and we went for a late afternoon amble along the escarpment, looking westwards across the Vale of Trent. So different from where I live, you could see for miles across the predominantly agricultural landscape, though it was a hazy sort of light.

This year's harvest is in and the fields were being ploughed ready for planting. As we walked home along the byways, the traffic mainly consisted of tractors and ploughs making their way back to their farms. Tractors these days are huge and very high tech. Look at those wheels!

There was an abundance of berries on the trees and some blackberries in the hedgerows, as well as boughs heavy with fruit on the apple trees. I'm never quite sure if the amount of fruit simply reflects the conditions over the past spring and summer or if it really does foretell of a hard winter to come. We'll find out soon enough!

Although I love Yorkshire's valleys and stone walls, all the Lincolnshire green and the open sky gives me a lovely sense of space and freedom.

A picture postcard view

A picture postcard view from Whisby Nature Park, Lincoln.
This is one of the former gravel pits that have been flooded to make lakes. It's a pretty scene that I enjoyed giving a painterly look with some texture.

Spring at Whisby

Whilst at my sister's, we also visited Whisby Nature Park. It's a reserve, run by the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust, that was once land quarried for sand and gravel and has now been reclaimed. The quarries are now lakes and there is grassland, marsh and willow scrub as well as fragments of the heathland, hedgerows and woodland that were there originally. There are some well-marked trails - although my sister and I did manage to overshoot the return path and were blithely walking around the circuit a second time, until we came to a stick that we recognised, stuck in the path. Oops! We might have carried on walking round and round until nightfall!

It was blissfully beautiful, with the spring flowers and colours at their height - cowslips (above), frothy cow parsley, orchids, fresh green leaves and the air fragrant with the honeyed scent of hawthorn blossom. My favourite time of year, by a long way.

The Spire Memorial

The centrepiece of the International Bomber Command Centre is the Spire Memorial and Walls. The Spire stands on a hill above the city of Lincoln and is aligned so that you can see Lincoln Cathedral through its heart. Made of weathering steel, it is 102ft high, the height of a Lancaster bomber's wing, and as wide at the base as a Lancaster wing. It represents not only a wing but also a church steeple. Air crew returning from raids used to navigate by church spires, as the blackout and other measures made it difficult to know exactly where they were.

The surrounding walls are laser cut with the names of almost 58,000 men and women who lost their lives serving or supporting Bomber Command during the Second World War. (Women did not fly as aircrew but some were ground crew or, for example, scientists who were killed on test flights.) Of the 125,000 aircrew who served, 72% were killed, seriously injured or taken prisoner of war. More than 44% were killed, with an average age of just 23 years. The centre really helps one to grasp the scale of the sacrifices made but also the key role Bomber Command played in the outcome of the war.

There is a great deal more information on the website HERE.

Because we remember

Visiting my sister last month, we went to the recently opened International Bomber Command Centre near Lincoln. It has been built 'to acknowledge the efforts, sacrifices and commitment of the men and women, from 62 different nations, who came together in Bomber Command during World War II'. Lincolnshire was home to 27 airfields from which bombing missions were flown, and there were many other stations in the east of England too.

The centre holds interactive educational displays, extensive records, artefacts and the personal testimonies of veterans and is a resource where people can research their family history through the Command records, online or in person. The memorial came about largely through the efforts of one man: a former Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire, Tony Worth CVO. It aims to serve as a point of recognition, remembrance and reconciliation for those who served, supported or suffered during the bombing campaigns of WWII.

It is sensitively done, recognising both the sacrifices of those involved and the damage and suffering caused by the bombardment of cities like Dresden.

There are ten acres of landscaped grounds, holding two areas planted as peace gardens. The planting is immature as yet, but it will look good when it has all grown a bit.

The International Peace Garden holds plants from five continents and recognises the contribution of people from 62 nations who served in or supported the Command.

The Lincolnshire Peace Garden has 27 lime trees, one for each of the Lincolnshire airfields. They are planted to simulate the geographical location of each airfield in relation to the others and each has a plaque with the name of the station, the squadrons that flew from there and the number of lives lost.

The memorial panel (top photo) is made of aluminium recovered from a Halifax bomber aircraft.

Barley.... or wheat?

I'm not sure I can tell wheat from barley when it is growing... I always assume that our harvest fields are wheat but after 'googling' this, I am persuaded that this may be barley. Barley (apparently) has whiskery strands all along the ear whereas in wheat it is shorter and concentrated near the tip. Wheat tends to be more golden yellow and barley is paler. Wheat tends to stay more upright than barley when ripe; barley heads can bow over. I may be completely wrong, of course! Anyway, the flat Lincolnshire arable fields were full of ripe crops and the harvest was in full swing when I was there in August.

Doddington estate

We intended to visit an Elizabethan (late 1500s) mansion west of Lincoln, called Doddington Hall. We didn't realise the hall itself and its gardens are closed to the public on Saturdays, as they host weddings there. Something to look forward to another time, hopefully... It didn't matter too much, as there is an attractive café, where we had a delicious lunch; a farm shop; home and clothing store and some lovely walks around the wider estate. The large fishpond appeared to have been relatively newly renovated, with an attractive curving bridge (on which I was standing to take this photo) reminiscent of that in Monet's garden at Giverny. It was a beautiful, tranquil scene. (Just needed some waterlilies, maybe?)

Lincoln Cathedral

We didn't go into Lincoln Cathedral this time. See HERE for a photo I took on a previous visit. 

There were a few Knight sculptures in the Cathedral precincts. 'The Lincoln City Knight' by Leah Goldberg celebrates the local football club's promotion to Sky Bet League Two at the end of the 2016-17 season. The Knight's shield is signed by the team's players. It is, perhaps, a rather incongruous choice to place at the front of the Cathedral but then football is, for many, a religion. The creature on the front of the horse is the Lincoln Imp, a carving that can be found in the Cathedral (see HERE).

'Inside Out', by Erin Fleming, is sited behind the Cathedral near the Chapter House. It has references to the pillars and vaulting inside the building, which are likened to trees. 

Below is the full glory of Lincoln's octagonal Chapter House, with its wonderful flying buttresses. Built between 1220 and 1235, the Chapter House was an annex to the Cathedral, where the cathedral chapter (clerics appointed to advise the bishop) would have met. King Edward II held a parliament here in 1316. 

The Knights' Trail

As has been popular elsewhere, this year Lincoln has installed a series of decorated sculptures throughout the city. These are knights on horseback, commemorating the 800th anniversary of the Battle of Lincoln (1217). The sculptures have been sponsored by local businesses and organisations, and painted by different artists. People are encouraged to follow the Knights' Trail to learn some interesting facts about the area and look for clues in a Knights' Quest.

There are 37 sculptures altogether. These are just a few of those I photographed. Above is 'Not all Stories are Black and White', by Ruth Piggott, sponsored by The Nomad Trust, a charity supporting the homeless. It has maps depicting the streets they walk on and the journeys they have taken to get where they are, with the various colours symbolising that everyone is different.

'The Knight in the Forest' , by Julia Allum, refers to the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Charter of the Forest, which dealt with the punitive Forest Laws that applied in all the royal forests. The Charter made life better for farmers who grazed their animals in the woods. 

Halfway up the steep hill I found 'Pedal Pride', by Erin Fleming, inspired by the Lincoln Grand Prix cycle race.

This is 'Sheriff de la Haye', by Rachel Olin, posed in front of the gateway to Lincoln Castle.  It is perhaps surprising that a woman held such a position of power in the 1200s. Nicolaa de la Haye resolutely led the defence of Lincoln Castle during the Battle of Lincoln in 1217, when rebel forces took the city of Lincoln. The rebels were trying to oust King John and his young son Henry, in favour of Prince Louis, son of the King of France. They were eventually defeated by a force of English knights led by William Marshal.

Finally, I liked the one below: 'The Knight has a Thousand Eyes', painted by Sue Guthrie. It refers to a hit song from the 1960s by Bobby Vee. (Oh yes, I remember it!) The cartoon eyes that decorate it are made of phosphorescent paint that glows in the dark.