A1-The Great North Road
Ermine Street ran to the west of Stamford’s site and led, instead, to the Roman town of Casterton. Here was an early fort (AD44) followed by a sizeable settlement with evidence of potteries, ore smelting and even a bath-house. The site of a medieval watermill can found where the Great North Road enters the village from Stamford, over the River Gwash. This is the river that was dammed to form Rutland Water. A Roman (and later Saxon) cemetery lay to the South of the settlement along Ermine Street. Just to the south of Great Casterton, on a road bank, is a nature reserve, imaginatively called Great Casterton Road Banks (OS G.R: TF 006084). It’s less than an acre but nonetheless worth a look particularly in early summer. A steep limestone bank rises from the main road and then there is a flattish bit at the top. The site is important for its limestone flowers, such as sulphur clover, greater broomrape, perennial flax, wild thyme, common rock-rose, salad burnet, kidney vetch and quaking-grass. And that road bank isn't just any old road bank. It exposes the stonework of the Roman Ermine Street.
The old finger-post just south of Great Casterton is hardly enhanced by new sign for the Methodist Chapel.
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There are a couple of milestones between Stamford and Great Casterton, both cast iron triangular plates bolted onto older stones, visible only from behind. The castings are similar, but not identical to the one on the A15 at Osbournby, which bears the name of Hornsey of Spitalgate, Grantham. Iron milestones of this type are typical of the early 19th century. Only the London 91 post is marked on the OS maps. Nearby is a sign saying 'Toll Bar', a sign of times past. |
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The road approaches Great Casterton down a hill which would be much steeper if it the road did not run on a great embankment built to lessen the gradient. The River Gwash runs through this embankment in more of a tunnel than a under a bridge. Curiously, it is sometimes known as the Roman Bridge (Phillips).
The Roman settlement comprises some bumps in the ground in fields on the east side of the village. By 1086, Domesday shows that Casterton had been overtaken by Stamford.
Tickencote Hall, built in 1705. was demolished fifty years ago, however the stable block of the same date was done up and is now called ... Tickencote Hall. It is rather nice. The small church is particularly famous as an example of elaborate Norman architecture, partly original and partly faithfully copied and rebuilt in 1792.
Humphrey Packington, writing in 1934, gave us this entry in his survey of his favourite villages:
Great Casterton has in places, at any rate, resisted the modernisation of the Great North Road, while its neighbour, Tickencote, is an instance of a village which, though near to the hum of life, is yet utterly secluded. It lies hardly more than a stone's throw from the Great North Road, a few miles beyond Stamford, but it is the quietest place imaginable. The road winds down past the sheltered churchyard, among the stone cottages and barns, to the old mill near the bottom of the lane, where the bubbling Gwash darts under the bridge and on to the gates of the Hall at the end of all things.
This is the home-land of poet John Clare. The Flower Pot, a pub that he and his fellow lime-burners frequented in Tickencote, is now a private house called Stonecroft. A little to the north, the site of an abandoned medieval village were the inspiration for Clare's 'Elergy on the Ruins of Pickworth'.
Lincolnshire
©Biff Vernon 2001, 2002, 2003
