Louth, Lincolnshire

Louth is a market town and civil parish in the East Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, England. Louth serves as an important town for a large rural area of eastern Lincolnshire. Visitor attractions include St James' Church, Hubbard's Hills, the market, many independent retailers, and Lincolnshire's last remaining cattle market.

Geography

Louth is at the foot of the Lincolnshire Wolds where they meet the Lincolnshire Marsh. It developed where the ancient trackway along the Wolds, known as the Barton Street, crossed the River Lud. The town is east of a gorge carved into the Wolds that forms the Hubbard's Hills. This area was formed from a glacial overspill channel in the last glacial period. The River Lud meanders through the gorge before entering the town.
Directly to the southeast of Louth is the village of Legbourne, to the northeast is the village of Keddington, to the northwest is the village of South Elkington, and to the southwest is the village of Hallington. The towns of Wragby, Market Rasen, Horncastle, Mablethorpe, Grimsby and Alford also are close to Louth.
The Greenwich Meridian passes through the town and is marked on Eastgate with plaques on the north and south sides of the street, just east of the junction with Northgate, although this location is known to be incorrect as the line actually passes through a point just west of Eastgate's junction with Church Street. A three-mile £6.6 million A16 Louth Bypass opened in 1991. The former route through the town is now designated as the B1520.

History

Three handaxes have been found on the Wolds surrounding Louth, dating from between 424,000 and 191,000 years ago, indicating inhabitation in the Paleolithic era. Bronze Age archeological finds include a 'barbed and tanged' arrowhead found in the grounds of Monks' Dyke Tennyson College.
St Helen's Spring, at the Gatherums, off Aswell Street, is dedicated to a popular medieval saint, the mother of Constantine the Great, the first Roman Emperor to become a Christian, but is thought to be a Christianised Romano-British site for veneration of the pagan water-goddess Alauna.
The Anglo-Saxon pagan burial ground northwest of Louth dates from the fifth-to-sixth centuries, and was first excavated in 1946. With an estimated 1200 urn burials, it is one of the largest Anglo-Saxon cremation cemeteries in England.
Æthelhard, a Bishop of Winchester who was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 793, was an abbot of Louth in his early life.
Louth is listed in the 1086 Domesday Book as a town of 124 households.
Louth Park Abbey was founded in 1139 by the Bishop Alexander of Lincoln as a daughter-house of the Cistercian Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. Following its dissolution in 1536 it fell into ruin and, today, only earthworks survive, on private land, between Louth and Keddington. Some of the ruins were incorporated into The Priory by Thomas Espin. Monks' Dyke, now a ditch, was originally dug to supply the abbey with water from the springs of Ashwell and St. Helen's at Louth.
In 1643, Sir Charles Bolles, a resident of Louth, raised a 'hastily-got-up soldiery' for the Royalist cause in the English Civil War. Fighting took place in, and around the town and, at one point, Bolles was forced to take refuge under the Ramsgate bridge. By the battle's end 'Three strangers, being souldgeres, was slain at a skirmish at Lowth, and was buryed'. Human remains, found during archaeological visits to Louth Park Abbey during the 1800s, in 'a little space surrounded by a ditch', were believed to date from the Civil War as two cannonballs, from that era, were found with the bodies.
The Louth flood of 1920 occurred in the town on 29 May 1920, causing 23 deaths. One woman climbed a chimney to survive, another was the only survivor from a row of twelve terrace houses, which were destroyed by the flood waters. Four stone plaques exist in the town to show how high the water level reached. Other, less devastating floods occurred in July 1968 and on 25 June and 20 July in 2007.
Margaret Wintringham succeeded her husband Thomas at the Louth by-election in September 1921, to become the Liberals' first female MP, and Britain's third female MP.
Between December 1969 and October 1974, Jeffrey Archer was Louth's MP.

St Herefrith of Louth

St Herefrith, or Herefrid, is Louth's 'forgotten saint', whose feast day is 27 February. He was a bishop, who died around 873, possibly killed by the Danes. An 11th-century text describes Herefrith as Bishop of Lincoln, but as the bishopric there dates to 1072, Lincoln more probably refers to Lindsey, the early name for Lincolnshire. Similar confusion exists in an inventory of Louth's St. James Church, written in 1486 and transcribed in 1512, where he is referred to as a Bishop of Auxerre, France.
At some point, following his death, a shrine venerating him was established at Louth. Æthelwold, the Bishop of Winchester from 963 to 984, was actively seeking relics for his newly rebuilt Thorney Abbey in Cambridgeshire and sent his monks to Louth to raid Herefrith's shrine. From an 11th-century account, Æthelwold had:

...heard of the merits of the blessed Herefrid bishop of Lincoln resting in Louth a chief town of the same church. When all those dwelling there had been put to sleep by a cunning ruse, a trusty servant took him out of the ground, wrapped him in fine line cloth, and with all his fellows rejoicing brought him to the monastery of Thorney and re-interred him.

A church dedicated to St. Herefrith, at Louth, appears in accounts from the 13th to 15th centuries, and one of his relics, an ivory comb, is recorded among the possessions of Louth's St. James Church in 1486. Suggestions that the shrine, and later church, of St. Herefrith, were earlier incarnations of St. James have "no supportive evidence", but St James' is the site of two earlier churches of which little is known, although the possession of relics of Herefrith within the parish church of St James and the continued celebration of his feast-day until the reformation period are suggestive of this possibility.

Transport

There are regular bus services connecting Louth with nearby Grimsby, Skegness, Mablethorpe and Lincoln. Different companies provide these, the main one being Stagecoach. However, Louth is not served by late-night services; the last bus leaves the town at 7:30pm.
The nearest active railway stations are now at Market Rasen, Grimsby Town and Skegness.
Louth is on two National Express coach routes. One is from Grimsby to Birmingham via Lincoln and Leicester, and the other is from Grimsby to London via Lincoln and Nottingham.
Louth railway station was a major intermediate station on the East Lincolnshire Railway which ran from Boston to Grimsby from 1848 and was also once served by rail motor services. The station had an extensive good yards which served the malt kilns.
Louth was the northern terminus of the Mablethorpe Loop, which ran through the nearby villages and seaside towns of Mablethorpe, Sutton-on-Sea, Grimoldby, Saltfleetby, Theddlethorpe, Mumby and Willoughby. The station was the terminus on the Louth to Bardney Line, which opened in 1876 but closed in 1951 to passengers and to freight traffic in 1960. Bardney was the connection of the branch line and the Lincolnshire Loop Line
The station closed to passengers in 1970 along with the Mablethorpe Loop Line and the section from Firsby to Louth of the East Lincolnshire Railway. The section to Grimsby remained in use for freight traffic until December 1980 when it closed and was later removed. The station building and Louth North Signal Box remain as private dwellings. All of the station site has been built on by residential and commercial outlets.
There are plans to have Louth as the southern terminus of the Lincolnshire Wolds Railway using the trackbed from Holton-Le-Clay, although the station will be north of Louth because the existing station building is occupied and the site around it built over. This would mean Louth would have a rail connection for the first time in almost 50 years.
Louth Canal was built between 1765 and 1770 to connect Louth to the sea at Tetney. It was formally abandoned in 1924.

St James' Church

The town was the origin of the Lincolnshire Rising, which started on 1 October 1536 in St James Church. The rising began after Rev. Thomas Kendall, the incumbent, gave an 'emotive sermon', the evening before the King's Commissioners were due to arrive and assess the church's wealth. Some of the townspeople, fearful that the church treasury would be seized by the men of the Crown, demanded the building's keys. The townspeople kept vigil that night, and, the following day, rang the church bells, 'an ancient call to rebellion', to gather a crowd. Having begun marching from Louth, 50,000 supporters converged to camp at Hembleton Hill, the following evening, before they continued to Lincoln to confront the King's Commissioners.
The town's skyline is dominated by the spire of St James' Church. A recent survey has confirmed the height of the stonework as and to the top of the cockerel weather vane as. It also confirms it as one of the very finest medieval steeples in the country. Though shorter than both Norwich Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral, it is the tallest medieval parish church spire in the United Kingdom. The building of the spire started in 1501 and was finally completed in 1515.
In 2015 two pieces of a pre-Conquest standing stone cross dating to were found in the adjoining rectory garden. The cross is of the 'ring' or 'wheel head' type, the central design being of Christ crucified, a form more commonly seen today in Ireland. The cross and its implications for the archaeology, history and the early church in Louth are discussed in an article in the journal Medieval Archaeology. The Louth Cross is on display within the church and a small booklet is available from the gift shop.
In 2017 funding was raised to fit a viewing door to the cell just below the spire floor that holds the original medieval treadwheel that was used to haul up the stone and mortar for the building of the spire. Substantial records exist in the churchwardens' accounts from 1501 onward for the construction and use of the wheel which was to become known as The Wild Mare. A small booklet about this rare survival is available from the church gift shop.