The Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust states in their Winter 2021 Lapwings magazine : “Bigger, more robust, nature reserves will be better able to withstand the effects of climate change and if we can link them into a coherent network, we will allow species to move across the landscape better and prevent fragmentation and isolation of vulnerable […]
Tag: Habitats.
Wet and Wild Carrs
After a spell at Louth George Tennyson took his sons out of the school there, that they hated, and set them up in a converted medieval bathhouse just outside their home village of Somersby. This old building was set in an old wood across a field from the rambling rectory where Alfred lived with his […]
The River Lymn and its Tributaries.
The small streams that come together to form the River Lymn run down from the hills west of Tetford. They pass through the village as a fast flowing stream which at this stage is the very epitome of Tennyson’s brook. Particularly just past Tetford watermill it babbles over rocks and roots as it hurries through […]
Traversing Lower Lymndale.
This traverse begins on the Ulceby Chalk Plateau. Apart from said hamlet this 100 metre high plateau for most of history was empty and windswept crossed by a few lonely roads. On old maps it is referred to as the Great Furze meaning mainly gorse scrub. It allowed until Tennyson’s youth for clusters of Stone […]
Damp Dale & Ashby Puerorum
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 […]
Gone is “All the land in flowery squares”.
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 […]
Widening the Wolds
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. […]
Tennyson Knolls
In Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. he spends a significant amount of time reminiscing of days spent with his close friend Arthur Hallam at his family home in Somersby. It allows the reader to get a glimpse into life at the rectory, especially at Christmas, but there is one section (XCV) which he describes spent in […]
Trails through the Dales.
The Snake Trail. Of the remaining possibilities for walking in Tennyson’s footsteps I have picked out a route called the Snake Trail, which is a short walk and the Geology trail which gives a more comprehensive view of the area. Snake trail is called this because the dry warm sandy soils around Somersby would have […]
Somersby and Bag Enderby.
The two villages of Somersby and Bag Enderby tucked away in the middle of Hill Wapentake essentially form a single unit and two hundred years ago were ministered as one by Tennyson’s father Dr. George Clayton Tennyson. They are separated from the rest of the Wolds by distinct physical boundaries with the steep red chalk […]