The past is there waiting for you to rescue it from the shadows
AN illuminating article appeared in the Grimsby Telegraph a few days ago. A rural explorer discovered the surviving signs of a vanished past in a wood near Louth. Although he thoughtfully declined to reveal the actual location I have a notion that he was at Walmsgate, a hamlet on the Louth to Skegness road, and in the old grounds of the long-vanished Hall whose celebrated gardens were, between the wars, open to the public.
Indeed, the late Maple Bedford, formerly Marfleet and a dear friend of mine, had a wonderful set of pictures of them. Coincidentally only last week Mrs Janet Clarke here in Scartho wrote to me telling me of a visit she and her sister made to Walmsgate to find traces of the Italian garden, but without success. Walmsgate Hall, pictured, was home to the Yorke family for many generations. The last denizen, Captain Thomas Dallas-Yorke, Crimean war veteran, former master of the Southwold Hunt, died aged 98 in 1925. The Hall was
demolished in the 1960s when the estate was sold.
Although I could write reams about the house and its past owners, I mention it this week because of our rural explorer.
All over this vast county of ours are the vestiges of past churches, of great and small houses, of entire villages, reminders huge and merely fragmenting.
And when our travel restrictions are lifted, when the weather bucks up and taking the laws of trespass into proper account, making your own discoveries on your own doorstep will prove just as exciting as all that ruins stuff abroad.
For instance, beyond Wragby is yet another hamlet, Panton. Here was a splendid house now gone. But the stable block which you can see from the road is very grand. But try to find the parish church! Stable blocks have survived, true. Try Weelsby Hall, Thonock, Kenwick and so on. They are obvious. They are the easy part of your quest. The greater satisfaction is elsewhere. Louth Marsh is littered with reminders, forts, buildings built from wrecked ships, churches become sheds, and so on ad inf. There’s nothing depressing about it. Only on my very doorstep was an old gatepost which once held a fivebarred gate, the entrance to Louth Road College Farm fields. It was just a reminder of things past. And we all need reminders.