but it was not completely destroyed until the Wars of the Roses.
"PRAY AND PLOUGH" Little Bytham, two miles to the east, is the station for Grimsthorpe, which is approached by a drive of three miles through the park. The church is dedicated to St. Medard, Bishop of Noyon, A.D. 531, a name familiar to us from the "Ingoldsby Legends." It shows some Saxon "Long and Short" work and a good deal of Norman, notably a doorway with a curious tympanum ornamented with birds in circles. There is a small lowside window of two lights on the west and a little Norman window high up on the east of this doorway, which is at the south-east angle of the nave. The Norman tower is surmounted by a transition upper story and spire. The south porch and chancel arch are Early English and all round the chancel runs a most interesting stone seat, broken only by a fine canopied recess for a tomb. A good agricultural motto is cut on the stone base of the pulpit, "Orate et arate," "pray and plough." The motto is not inapt, for the land about here is mostly plough land, and one wonders it should be as good as it is, for the limestone is very near the surface, indeed the Great Northern line has stone in situ on each side of it about five feet high, which seems to have very few inches of soil above it, and this runs the whole way from Little Bytham to Corby, and again at Ponton the lines pass through it in a deeper cutting.
But to return to our Witham river. This keeps due north by North-Witham, Colsterworth, Easton, Stoke Rockford, Great and Little Ponton to Grantham, a distance of ten miles. The church at North Wytham has a long nave, a narrow massive Norman chancel arch, and the floor descending to the east. In the 1887 restoration by Withers, a choir was formed out of the east end of the nave, and the chancel has been left as a monumental chapel for the Sherard family monuments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a decidedly clever arrangement. Robert Sherard seems to have been a scholar, for he occupied his thoughts when on his deathbed in writing twenty-six Latin elegiacs now on his brass and dated 1592.
From Colsterworth a road runs east past Twyford Forest, twelve miles to Bourne. In the church, which is both Norman, Decorated, and Perpendicular, there is the Newton chapel, with tombs of Sir Isaac's parents and grandparents. This is modern, but is on the site of the old Woolsthorpe Manor chapel. It
