Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/210

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

THE BARTON HOY Barton, to Hull; and Sir J. Nelthorpe notes in his pocket book, under date August 9th, 1793. "arrived at Scawby after a very bad passage over the Humber, having been on the water five hours, and at last forced to run on shore in Barrow Haven, not being able to make Barton, owing to the negligence of the boatmen in not leaving Hull in time; my horses, seven in number, remained in the boat from four o'clock in the morning till seven at night, before they could be landed."

Coming back from the Cliff Edge road, we turn up the hill for Barton-on-Humber, and from the top of the Wold, which here comes to an end, we get a really beautiful and extended view in all directions. But we must now speak of Barton, with its two old churches.


BARTON-ON-HUMBER

Barton-on-Humber had a market and a ferry when Domesday Book was compiled, and was a bigger port than Hull. At the Conquest it was given to the King's nephew, Gilbert of Ghent, son of Baldwin Earl of Flanders, whose seat was at Folkingham. The ferry is still used, and the Hull cattle boats mostly start from Barton landing-stage, but most of the passenger traffic is from the railway pier at New Holland, four miles to the east. The town is a mile from the waterside. It has two fine churches, of which St. Peter's is one of the earliest in England; curiously one of the same type of Saxon church is also at a Barton, Earl's Barton in Northants, and not far from it is another of similar date, at Brixworth, which is held to be the most noteworthy of all the early churches in England. Barnack and Wittering in the same county are also of the same style and of the same antiquity, and at Dover, at Bradford-on-Avon, and at Worth and Sompting in Sussex are others similar. Stow, near Lincoln, Broughton near Brigg, and Hough-on-the-Hill, and the two Lincoln towers and Bracebridge, are of similar age, but these last, like Clee and so many in the neighbourhood of Grimsby, Caistor and Gainsborough, have little but their tower or part of their tower left that can be called Saxon, while at Stow, and some of the churches in the other counties mentioned, there is more to see of the original building.

The last restoration of St. Peter's, Barton, in 1898, has put the church into good condition and left the old work at the west