Kirton - Our holiday base
Kirton is a small town just south of Boston in Lincolnshire, where we had our holiday accomodation for a week while we explored around Boston.
Kirton was one of the first Royal centres for the Saxon kingdom established after the Romans left in the fourth century. It was also a major administrative centre for the Holland district of Lincolnshire in the seventeenth century.
One prominent figure in village life was farmer and philanthropist William Dennis. He was benefactor of the Town Hall (below), which was built in 1911 to commemorate the coronation of George V, and the founder of a family business still flourishing in the village today. This is a statue in his honour in the village.
Born in 1841, he built up a huge potato enterprise and supplied all the potatoes eaten at a dinner for the poor of London to mark King Edward VII’s coronation.
His farm, Woodlands Organic Farm, consists of level silt fields which were reclaimed from the sea by the monks of Crowland Abbey some 900 years ago.
It`s intersting how the Fens were drained. It appears that attempts to drain the Fens, and to protect land from flooding, began as long as Roman times, and continued throughout the Middle Ages, but the ‘Great Draining‘ took place in the seventeenth century. King James I declared in 1620 that ‘the Honour of the Kingdom would not suffer the said Land to be absorbed to the Will of the Waters, nor let it keep Waste and unprofitable.’ He would himself be responsible for the reclamation of the fen lands. He invited Cornelius Vermuyden to England, initially to drain marshes in Essex: Vermuyden was a Dutchman, then only 26 years old. The great works of large-scale drainage of the mid-seventeenth century in Fenland that followed, like the Old and New Bedford Rivers and the Denver Sluice, are some of the largest man-made landscape features in England.
When I compare places like Kirton with the Suffolk villages that I am used to, it emhasizes to me what a beautiful part of the world I live in! KIrton is very much `houses and houses` but I guess that in all fairness, unless you live there, you can`t appreciate its character.
One intersting old building I came across was the Old King's Head
The Old King's Head is a former public house listed as a Grade II historic building. The earlier part of it was built at the end of the 16th century and underwent major alterations in 1661. It is red brick in English bond, with recent tiles on a former thatched roof. It became a domestic residence in the 1960s, but had fallen into disrepair and was purchased in 2016 by Heritage Lincolnshire, which has assigned over £2 million for its restoration.
During the 1660’s the Old King’s Head was remodelled by masons (not architects) in the Fen Artisan Mannerist style. This was an extremely skilful type of architecture for masons of the time. Contemporary buildings were rarely built with bricks, with only those of high status normally used brick work.
This meant when building The Old King’s Head it would have needed a skilful mason for the design and construction. It also once had a thatched roof which has now been preserved under new panelled roofing.
Not only does the building itself hold historic significance but the people who have inhabited The Old King’s Head throughout the years have infused it with life. Over the 400 years it spent as a public house it has seen a wide range of land lords and owners including the famous boxer, Johnny Cuthbert.
The building has many stories and mystery’s attached to it. There is a tale of a Victorian woman haunting the top of the stairs. A previous resident who lived there as a child told Heritage Lincolnshire ‘how nobody wanted to be last down the stairs because it was so spooky’.
As a starting point for exploration, Kirton was ideal.
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