Stop And Look Around Once In A While

The Swipe Volume 1 Chapter 31 The Swipe Volume 1 Chapter 32

Stop And Look Around Once In A While

Lincolnshire has always been one of those liminal zones. The places you go through on the way to somewhere more interesting. We regularly spin past the county on the way up to the Lakes or our beloved Northumberland. It always seemed perfectly pleasant. Just not enough to stop.

That was a mistake I’m delighted to finally rectify. Lincolnshire is well worth slamming on the brakes for.

This is all on TLC, naturally. She is the organiser, the tour manager, the research dynamo of our household. It’s thanks to her that we fell in love with Coniston, Seahouses, Bamburgh. When she gets a notion to roll out, that itch in her caboose, I am very happy to follow along in her wake.

She said ‘Lincolnshire’. I said ‘Yes, ma’am’.

Let’s contextualise. We are spending the week in a lovely bungalow tucked off the main drag (OK, a road with two pubs and a Co-Op on it) of Skellingthorpe, a sleepy village three miles from Lincoln. The house sleeps six. We have it to ourselves. So roooomy. A bathroom each. Potentially a bedroom each, although I stress to add that will not happen on my watch. A big, clean-walled, high-ceilinged front room. A sofa each. A good kitchen, natch. My one insistence when TLC is booking our base camps.

The grub was a draw when TLC put the pin on this part of the country, actually. Lincolnshire is very foodie. Flat, fertile. Miles of coast. Famous, of course, for sausages, cheese and the dense fruit loaf called plum bread. As we’ve discovered on our ramblings around the country, these are only the starting points. The brewing and distillery scene is booming and distinctive. I love the uptick in local rums, investing in a bottle from Atlas which leans into the maritime feel by including a lump of ship’s hull in the bottle of their Scotch Coffee Rum (it’s like barrel-aged but not, if you catch my drift).

Skellingthorpe is home to Daisy Made, an ice cream joint on the outskirts of town which whisks up a ton of different delicious flavours out of milk gathered daily from the ladies you can see gently munching on cud in the field next door. I strongly recommend a cone of the Kitkat, and I should note they do takeaway by the litre and two-litre.

That’s not the coolest part. They have a petting zoo with alpacas, goats, bunnies, guinea pigs and zebra finches. That’s not the coolest part. They have a drive-thru window. If you’re not excited by the prospect of grabbing a waffle-cone of super delicious, super local ice cream to go before spending quality time with a friendly goat then I don’t know what to do with you.

I somehow had the idea that Lincolnshire was landlocked. I’ve never been great at geography and there’s the proof. The county has a gorgeous run of coastline from the Humber estuary to the northern edge of The Wash. At Skegness, you can wave to the good folk of Hunstanton in East Anglia. And because it’s the east coast, you have unbroken expanses of golden, sugar-soft beaches.

Skegness is the famous coastal destination in Lincolnshire. It’s a lot of fun and, on the balmy day we spent there, not at all bracing. I love a good English seaside town, and Skeggy does not disappoint. You’ve got the pier. You’ve got the amusements and the pleasure beach and the air of quiet desperation and gentle dilapidation once you get past the esplanade and it’s all you expect and hope for. We had lunch from the one decent chippy on the seafront, Trawler’s Catch (most of the really good ones are back in the town proper and were bustling, I am happy to report) which fed us huge portions of haddock and chips with change from a twenty. It also featured a bizarre semi-animatronic pirate show above the entrance which groaned into life every fifteen minutes and had some of the smaller kids who saw it screaming in bewildered rapture. I mean, it got on my nerves a bit but I’m no longer a sugared-up five year old. Physically, at least.

But a five minute walk away from the arcades and the bright lights and you’re looking at beach and sky and that’s it. This run of coastline feels so familiar, because I’m so used to it from our times in Norfolk and Northumberland. Sea and sand to the horizon. Put your back to Skeggy and you could be looking at the views the Vikings had when they pulled their longships ashore.

The history of this area is carved onto the landscape. Many of the towns have been around in some form since our Scandi cousins decided to stop raiding and start settling down. If a place has -thorpe or -by in it you know you’re likely to be in Danelaw, the huge swathe of north-eastern England colonised by the Vikings. Lincoln, especially, has been fought over by different factions for a thousand years. It’s a cheerfully ramshackle city where Danish, Roman, medieval and Georgian history are layered, bits and pieces peeping out over each other. Over it all, the cathedral and castle loom, God and Monarch glaring at the miscreants swarming on the hills below. Both are worth a visit—if you’re on a budget though, take a wander around the cathedral, poke your nose through the door and save your money for the castle, home to the Magna Carta and a wall walk which opens the town up to you.

Worth taking a snap inside the cathedral – no charge for that.

It’s an uptown/downtown deal, Lincoln. The cultural, picturesque part of town is reachable from the waterfront and main shopping drags, as long as you’re happy to test your thighs on the 1-in-2 wonky gradient of the not-ironically named Steep Hill. A very clear lesson in the division between church and state.

The cathedral does sorta dominate the view…

If I’m honest, I preferred Louth, which still has the history but has a slightly more arty, foodie vibe and considerably fewer brutal inclines. Buy your sausages at Laking’s Butchery, your cheese at Beaumont’s and enjoy a wander in and out of the alleyways off the Main Street where cool coffee shops cluster. Oh, the church here has the highest medieval spire in Europe. And the town is on the Greenwich Meridian. Louth is a cool place, which it wears lightly and with grace. They have a food and drink festival in early October which I’m sorry to miss.

It all sounds like we’ve crammed a lot into the holiday. Yes, we have, but it became very clear very quickly that a week just wasn’t going to be enough. We haven’t managed to do any walking through the beautiful Lincolnshire Wolds. There are a ton of great looking little villages and towns which we’ve just had to, with regret, leave in our rear-view mirrors, not having the time to stop. We didn’t even make it up to Cleethorpes, for gawd’s sake.

I did get a chance to pay my respects to this son of Lincoln, though.

So, yeah, we’re gonna have to come back. A bit of the country which was always just part of the journey has become a destination. I love when that happens. The UK never ceases to surprise and delight us. We haven’t been abroad since 2018. At this rate, I’m not sure we ever need to get on a plane to see something great again.

John Hughes’ line for his little demon Ferris Bueller come to mind when I think about our time in Lincolnshire. Recite it with me.