Most of October had been mild, wet and sometimes windy until a ridge of high pressure passed through giving a brief window of calmer weather. Ahead was the weekend for changing the clocks so this made it a good time to get up before light as with the clocks due to go back  it […]

Over the last two years I have spent many days discovering the special nature of the southern Lincolnshire Wolds, which is often only revealed under the right conditions and often well away from any roads. This quest to understand the special qualities of this still unspoiled countryside was to help me write my blog tennysoncountry.com. […]

With studying and exploring the southern Lincolnshire Wolds in detail for tennysoncountry.com  and researching many events through time, both geological and historical that created this intimate environment, this blog is as much about the landscape with which Tennyson was so familiar as it is about the great poet himself. These events not only moulded the […]

  When at school I had to learn a hymn that started “There is a green hill far away”. The only green hills I was interested in back then were the Wolds, which I visited at weekends with friends on our bikes looking for steep hills and clear streams. The green hill I am standing […]

Whereas Green Hill is made up of free draining chalk, as are the hills that surround it, just five miles away Damp Dale is a valley of impervious  clay surrounded by ridges of drier sandstone. Along the boundary between the two types of strata many small streams issue from the ground and coalesce in the […]

All the land in flowery squares, This is a line from Tennyson’s The Gardener’s Daughter a relatively early poem by the bard. It is referring to the countryside in May, which he was familiar with while growing up in Lymndale. The squares are small hedged fields filled with meadow flowers and much more. After then […]

Although the Lincolnshire Wolds AONB stretches some 50 kilometres from north to south (Caistor to Gunby)  the distance across it south of Louth is as little as 11 kilometres. North of Claxby St. Andrew  the eastern boundary follows close to the line of the 50 metres contour, which overlooks the marsh up to Little Cawthorpe. […]