The Lincolnshire Enigma

What even is Lincolnshire?

Before I go on, I want to point out that this isn’t just about Lincs, but I’ll come to the rest later on.

I’ve lived in Leicestershire since 1985 CE, after spending the first dozen and a half years of my life largely surrounded by Kent. Such, probably most, locations give one certain impressions about their neighbours and further afield. There’s a famous couple of posters called something like “The Londoner’s View Of The World” and the same with NYC, showing the streets of these great cities prominently at the bottom and ever smaller segments of ever larger and more distant parts of the world above them. You may have seen them. But there would seem to be a more objective way of approaching things.

In my head, I divide England up into the North, the Midlands, the West Country, East Anglia, Cornwall, the South and the Home Counties plus London. Because I live in the Midlands, I divide it up further into the East and West Midlands. As I live in Leicestershire, I tend to think of it as a central county becoming more like other regions towards the edges. Hence Northwest Leicestershire is a bit hillier than most of the rest of the county, like the Peak District in that direction and the area towards Rutland is flatter like East Anglia, then Harborough is a teensy bit more like the Home Counties. But in fact none of that really makes sense so far as I can tell. Great Britain perhaps unsurprisingly, is low next to the North Sea (which I really want to call the German Ocean), since it ends up below sea level, so it makes sense that east Leicestershire and Rutland are lower, but since Leicestershire is as far from the sea as you can get, it might also be expected to be the highest bit of ground on the island but it seriously isn’t. It’s generally known that this island tilts from the northwest to the southeast, very roughly, divided by a line drawn between the mouth of the River Tees which runs through Middlesbrough and that of the River Exe which passes through Exeter. There are also lines along which language is divided, referred to as isoglosses, similar to the isobars on weather maps, marking divisions between features of language. For the English language, one of these also passes northeast to southwest and has recently passed directly through Leicestershire, with “bath” being pronounced with a short vowel to the north and a long one to the south:

I’m from that bit in the southeast so I say “baaaath”.

Another thing about saying I’m in the Midlands is that I suspect that this word is used for the middle of other nations. In particular I seem to remember there used to be a Scottish coach service called “Scottish Midland” or something serving the Central Belt of Scotland, which is the densely populated area in and around Glasgow and Edinburgh. I’ve also heard the middle of Ireland referred to as the “Irish Midlands” and there’s a town in Ontario called Midland as well. Therefore I tend to say that I live in the English Midlands, even though I don’t think other regions are usually referred to in that way. I also talk about living in the East Midlands, which is, I think, less ambiguous.

This brings me back to Lincolnshire. None of what I’m going to say is supposed to be a criticism of that county, insofar as it is a county – I’ll get to that later. My main disquiet concerns the difficulty of pigeonholing it. There are the English Midlands, East Anglia and the North of England, all of which, I feel, could claim it. Every other county around Leicestershire is uncontroversially in the Midlands: Rutland, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Northamptonshire. Of these, I have tended to feel that Derbyshire is a bit far west to be considered in the East Midlands. Nevertheless, it is. Then there’s the east of England, usually referred to as East Anglia but the former is vaguer. Norfolk and Suffolk undoubtedly belong to East Anglia. I would say that every other county in the east of England has a weaker claim than that pair. A friend who lives in Cambridgeshire said she had no doubt that she was in East Anglia, and if that belongs to it, surely Huntingdonshire does too. Essex is a kind of borderline case, in that it’s on the same bit of land as the “Folks” but it’s a “Sex”, which are only in the South. I’d like there to be more “Folks” really, because there are so many “Shires”, but sadly it was not to be. Given that they’re clearly north and south, Essfolk would be in Doggerland and Westfolk presumably would be Huntingdonshire or something, but no. Apart from anything else, “Essfolk” has a bit of a flooding issue. So is Lincolnshire in a similar position to Essex? Is it in a boundary situation? I’ve seen it referred to in adverts as an eastern county.

East Anglia comes across as like a kind of “almost Southern” area to me, because as I’ve said before, “The East is South of the West“. People in Cambridge do say it feels much more like the South than other parts of England on the same latitude, so if Cambridgeshire is in the South and the division runs east-west, so is Shrewsbury. However, would that make Lincolnshire “almost Southern”? Parts of it are north of parts of Lancashire, and surely Lancashire isn’t allowed to be in the South at all, is it? I mean, it wouldn’t want to be I imagine. This does, of course, still make sense if you accept that the dividing line runs roughly northeast to southwest, because then Gloucester is permitted to be southern, which it clearly is, but Worcester’s in the Midlands, which is also definitely true.

If Lincolnshire is in East Anglia, that makes it an honorary southern county. That would’ve been okay up until the abolition of Humberside in 1996, or more precisely while that county existed for the twenty-two years after 1974. To me, there’s nothing more quintessentially northern than the Humber, so obviously a county named after it has got to be in the North. This put Cleethorpes and Grimsby in the North, which definitely seems right. However, this wasn’t true before or after that period, and consequently Lincolnshire, that oddly southern county now with bits north of bits of Lancashire, reclaimed those towns and other areas and hence Grimsby, a very Northern-sounding town, is now in the South. Then again Holby is in the South, so Southern places can have Danish names if a scriptwriter doesn’t do their homework properly. I wonder, actually, where the southernmost “-by” is: possibly Oadby?

Then again, maybe Lincolnshire is in the East Midlands. One memorable day, local radio in Leicester was reading out school closures for a snow day and included places in that county, describing it as in the East Midlands, so that’s one possibility. This presumably only applied to the southernmost parts of that shire, which incidentally has a short border with Northamptonshire, which is partly closer to the Equator than Buckingham is (miss out the “is” and it sounds like it’s near Timbuktu). This probably indicates a major factor in the problem: Lincolnshire is a particularly large county for England, being the second largest by area after the famously vast Yorkshire. Hence it’s hardly surprising it doesn’t fit into any particular region. Before South Humberside was returned to it, it was only the third largest, and at that time Yorkshire had been divided into several counties too. Devon was bigger. In general, very roughly, the larger a county is, the more sparsely populated it is, but this is not so for Yorkshire as it stands today because the big cities of the West Riding, and also Hull, are once again under its umbrella, and they certainly are sentimentally if not de jure.

This vagueness of regionality applies to other counties too, for instance Bedfordshire, which no longer officially exists, insists it’s part of the Midlands, and Cheshire and Herefordshire are similarly vague. But it doesn’t end there.

There is a whole other sense in which Lincolnshire ceased to exist in 1888. The Local Government Act of that year recognised its division, like that of Yorkshire into the three ridings, into “parts”: Lindsey, Kesteven and Holland, along with the county borough of Lincoln itself. Since it was the second largest English county, this does make sense. It feels odd that one of them is called “Holland” though, like the Dutch administrative units. Kesteven, the closest part to Leicestershire, impinges on my mind as somewhence a particular troop of Morris dancers hail. Since these all had separate county councils until 1974, then Humberside got carved out until 1996, Lincolnshire as we know it has only existed since almost the end of the last century, as well as existing before 1888. In fact it didn’t legally exist after that in the same form either because North and Northeast Lincolnshire are now unitary authorities, the latter being Grimsby and Cleethorpes. It seems kind of soulless to call Grimsby and Cleethorpes that. After all, here in Leicestershire we have Oadby and Wigston, though not as a unitary authority. Even so, they all have “Lincolnshire” in their official titles.

I have relatives in Lincoln, and have visited them there as well as going to Lincoln as an interesting place to visit. My impression of the place, which surely is the essence of Lincolnshire, is that it’s an East Anglian or southeastern city. Hence I deem Lincolnshire Southern. I have spoken! The South of England begins at Whitton Ness, 53°42’51″N. While I’m talking about lines on the map, the county is also partly in the Eastern Hemisphere, which is only true of a handful of English counties and of course not so in Scotland or Wales. Hence it could also be seen as eastern. But it’s the same latitude as Darwen, a southern suburb of Blackburn. Blackburn isn’t in the South but that’s okay because the North doesn’t begin at a specific latitude. Lincolnshire is simply the last gasp of the South.

I am aware that I’ve just completely ignored the Midlands, but I shall remedy that now. The English Midlands is that region of England which is transitional between the North and the South, so it begins at the Humber and ends in Gloucestershire. I hope everyone finds that satisfactory.

As a child, I lived in what was once referred to as the “Deep South”, with reference to the American region, but the South of England. That is, the region of England south of the Thames as it runs through London. I’m guessing that the southernmost part of the Thames in London is just north of Wandsworth, 51° 28′ N, which is still north of almost all of Kent. On more recent visits to Sussex, even including West Sussex, I realised that I’d concertinaed both counties to a vague “just outside Kent”. Having had a massive chunk removed from it and added to Greater London, Kent is now sadly reduced, but Sevenoaks is eighty-eight kilometres from Broadstairs whereas Sussex, including both counties (another result of the 1888 Act incidentally) is around 120 kilometres wide east-west. According to my child’s mind, that whole county, almost fifty percent “wider”, was “just outside Kent”. I mean, I did watch a lot of ‘Doctor Who’ so maybe that would explain it.

In the meantime, the North of England for me ended at Yorkshire and started with Derby and Nottingham. I considered Scotland to begin immediately north of Yorkshire. Don’t ask me where I thought Tyne-Tees Television covered or where Durham and Newcastle upon Tyne were. This distortion of perspective was borne in upon me once when someone said to me, “she’s from near you – Bournemouth.” Bournemouth is 215 kilometres from Canterbury, which is as far as Antwerp and Leicester. This comment was from someone from Helsby in Cheshire, although he actually used to tell people he was from Frodsham because he thought Helsby was too obscure. I’d never heard of either of course.

Speaking of regions, my part of Kent is chalky and flinty. I think of West Sussex as a county which looks familiar but isn’t, in that buildings, rocks, cliffs, hills and soil all look like they do where I come from but none of the places are recognisable to me. Northern France is also similar. It looks like home except that a lot of the bits humans have stuck on top of it are not like the bits humans in Kent have stuck on top of that. This impression actually continues for a very long way into France. Basically the whole of Northern France from Britanny to Reims is like a kind of super-Sussex to me, except for that built up bit in the middle which is like London but has nicer weather. Lille is the closest big city (230 000) to Canterbury excluding London, the next in England being the slightly smaller Portsmouth. Southampton is the furthest place from Canterbury I still considered local.

Finally, back to Lincolnshire. As you probably know, we went to Cleethorpes the other day and I was most gratified to reach, at long last, the fabled Humber. The Humber is the widest tidal estuary which resembled a river in Britain and the Trent and Ouse both empty into it. Although it’s an estuary all the way, it’s often called the River Humber, and to be honest I want it to be a river because that makes it the widest river in Britain at a nautical mile where the Humber Bridge stands. As we stood on the beach at Cleethorpes, which by the way is remarkably poorly provisioned, I’m guessing due to poverty and Westminster not caring, we could just see the other bank on the horizon, which is of course Yorkshire. I imagined some kind of Moses seeking the promised land of Yorkshire being allowed to glimpse it but never set foot in it after forty years of wandering.

And that was the end of the South.

الروح تسافر بوتيرة الجمل

This is obviously from Google Earth. It’s approximately pentagonal and covers much of Western Europe. Most of it is within the territory of the Roman Empire at maximum extent, but not all. But what is it?

This is the polygon formed by the extreme points of my movements on the surface of this planet. It took around eight years to form this shape, and in fact I’ve just realised some of it is missing because I forgot Aberdeen, which extends the time period to nine years.

Here’s a revised version then:

Right, so now it’s a hexagon and it clearly shows the curvature of the planet because it’s slightly zoomed out. This, then, is the area I’ve occupied and visited in my life. I also visited all of it by travelling by road, rail or ferry. The westernmost point was actually by bike. The maximum distance within this area is between Rome and Inverness, which are 2 112 kilometres apart.

Although I have four times committed the sin of air travel in an heavier than air craft, which also occurred within this hexagon, I had already reached all these points overland and sea, and later on under the sea bed once the Channel Tunnel was built. It’s a modest area compared to many Westerners to be sure, but it has the virtue of having been experienced every step of the way on the surface. I didn’t have the dislocation one experiences of stepping into an airliner and off it again a few hours later without having witnessed the transition from, say, the green chalk downs and streams of Kent and Northern France to the near-desert of Burgos.

The earliest point on this map was laid down in August 1987 CE, when my brother and I visited Aberdeen. Aberdeen is Scotland’s third city, pretty isolated compared to Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and largely made of granite. Even though it was the height of summer, it was a grey, overcast day and pretty cold really. It was also really windy. Aberdeen kind of has a beach, but I get the impression there isn’t much sunbathing on it. To be honest, even Blackpool in England, 370 kilometres to the south, isn’t really suitable for sunbathing or swimming in my opinion. Remarkably, though, like many other coastal towns in Britain, Aberdeen has its share of seaside shops selling buckets and spades and inflatables for the water, so I suppose there are people made of sterner stuff than I.

Inverness is only 133 kilometres from Aberdeen and I’ve been there a few times. Once again it can be exceedingly windy but it seems to be warmer than Aberdeen. Aberdeen has been known to drop below freezing in August, although its average temperature is 8.8°C, whereas Inverness averages 9.2 and has never dropped below freezing in August. It’s also a lot smaller than Aberdeen and doesn’t look overwhelmingly grey, has the fastest river in Britain running through it, which is also very short and probably would’ve stopped any Nessie candidates from entering or leaving the loch. Being the capital of the Highlands, like many other Scottish cities and towns Inverness has a lot more in the way of facilities than an English settlement of similar size.

The next corner of the hexagon is Inishmore, an island off the coast of County Galway and almost as far west as you can go in Europe. Its western end is 9° 50′ west of Greenwich and is unsurprisingly the furthest west I’ve ever been. There used to be an incredibly competitive pair of ferry services to it who would frantically plead and cajole you talking nineteen to the dozen to get you to use their boat rather than the other’s, but this is apparently no longer so because one of them sank the other’s boat! Sarada, I and our daughter cycled the length of the island and encountered its frankly terrifying cliff edge that runs along the southwest edge, and in fact I wonder in a geologically naïve way whether this is connected to it being on the edge of a continent, but whereas that’s an appealing idea it’s probably quite fanciful. Even so, the nearest land on that latitude to the west is over three thousand kilometres away on the east coast of Canada, or rather it’s Double Island in Nova Scotia. I visited Inishmore in 1995. Inverness was the site of a terminal argument between my first girlfriend and me about free range eggs, and County Galway marked the point at which two close friends of ours, with whom we’d gone on holiday, split up, so maybe there’s something about extreme points which puts relationships under stress, like the sweater curse.

The next point is Madrid, where Sarada and I went on our honeymoon in June and July 1993 and have since revisited. Sarada used to live in Madrid, so she was revisiting it after some time away. Madrid is a number of things. It’s at the geographical centre of Spain and the first one of these points which is within the former Roman Empire although it isn’t actually a Roman city and it really shows with its very irregular street pattern. It’s hot and dry, and has a population of three million. The line between Inishmore and Madrid is almost 1 500 kilometres long and cuts across entirely Roman Catholic territory. Because it’s probable that the Gaels came from Spain, I’m likely to have an exclusively male-line connection with Spanish Celts living there in Roman times. I don’t feel a particular affinity with Spain but I do kind of wonder if the reason we got stuck in Burgos was that my ancestors were grabbing my ankles and pulling me down. Spain also hold the distinction of being the only place I’ve ever managed to get sunburnt, owing to being stuck outside in the midsummer Sun for weeks on end while we struggled to get back to England. This led to a flaky skin condition on my face which, surprisingly, resolved when I visited the next point of the hexagon.

Which is Rome, 1 300 kilometres or so almost due East, and once again the line cuts over exclusively Roman Catholic countries. Rome is just awesome. I first went there in July 1988 when I was interrailing with friends, and I was absolutely blown away by the place. Everything is still there! Well, not everything, but the layout of the streets and many of the buildings are ancient Roman. It was when I went back in about 2004 that my skin condition cleared up but unfortunately it returned once I went back to Britain and I was stuck with it for almost another decade. Rome is the furthest east I’ve been, whereas Madrid is the furthest south, but the two cities are on similar latitudes. Rome is 12° 30′ east, whereas Madrid is 40° 25′ north.

The last point is Innsbruck, the famous origin of the ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ and visited a few days before Rome in July 1988 on my interrailing session. It shares a number of features with Aberdeen and perhaps Inverness to a lesser extent. It’s in a mountainous area, it doesn’t mark any compass point extremities for me and it’s the third largest city in a Germanic-speaking partly mountainous Western European country. On my hexagon, it also shares a side with Aberdeen, and this line finally enters Protestant territory. This line is also the only one which cuts across countries I’ve never entered, namely Germany and the Netherlands. The interior of the shape, however, also includes the whole of Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Andorra, none of which are familiar to me. The whole northeastern line ventures into vagueness, but this is probably because the west side is mainly ocean.

Countries which are completely enclosed include Andorra, Liechtenstein, Belgium, the Vatican (just – I’ve walked round it so it has no exposed side even if I hadn’t been elsewhere in Rome such as Trastevere), Monaco, Luxembourg, Switzerland and of course France, the largest country which is entirely enclosed. The centre of the area seems to be Limoges (“Lions In My Own Garden – Exit Someone”). The total area is larger than any US state and all but twelve countries.

It doesn’t need saying that I have by no means covered every square centimetre of this area, but that brings up a more general issue about what it means to be in a place. If I counted countries instead, the area would stretch from Out Stack to La Restinga and Roque del Barbudo to Museo di Ecologia degli Ecosistemi Mediterranei in Italy (just). It’s also notable that I actually live in the northwest of this area and have explored mainly south and east, and that the northernmost point is still in Great Britain. The largest number of borders between me and home is three, in the Vatican and Austria. The perimeter is getting on for a seventh of the way round the world, a distance light would travel in a single frame of video. However, this depends on the accuracy of that perimeter, because depending on what counts as an area I’ve been to.

The distance to the horizon seems like a reasonable measure, and it might make a difference to my polygon because of St Anton Am Arlberg. While I was in Austria, I climbed the Arlberg, not all the way to the top because it did the usual thing of appearing to be entirely ahead of me every time I thought I’d managed to get most of the way up it. I took a stone from it home with me, which over millions of years might make it a bit shorter if everyone did it so maybe don’t. Therefore it would be cheating to say that the furthest I’ve got sight of on this planet would be the view of the the horizon from the peak of the Arlberg, or rather the Valluga, which is 2 811 metres above sea level, which could extend to a further peak in theory. This is 189 kilometres to sea level, which is at least as far as the Großglockner, which is in any case the highest mountain in Austria and therefore would be easily visible from the Valluga on a clear day. It’s 12° 41′ east, therefore beating Rome by eleven minutes of arc. Beyond that, it becomes rather indeterminate as, for instance, another peak twice as distant but the same height twice as far away would also be visible in the same conditions, and beyond that the refraction of the atmosphere becomes significant. It’s possible to see slightly further than the horizon would be in a vacuum because the atmosphere refracts light and makes distant objects seem higher up than they really are. On Venus this situation is extreme and the viewpoint seems to be at the bottom of a basin when it’s on a flat surface, but it still happens on Earth.

It’s odd that even though German is my second language, sort of, I’ve never actually been to Germany. The languages indigenous to the polygon are English, Irish, Gàidhlig, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton, French, Flemish, Luxembourgisch, Alsatian, Italian, Castilian, Provençal, Latin (the Vatican), German, Dutch, various Swiss and Northern Italian Romance languages and Basque. That’s all surviving Celtic languages and one non-Indo-European language. As for population, it’s harder to work out but it’s above a hundred million people. It’s also large enough for the angles not to conform with plane Euclidean geometry and therefore also area. It covers more than 19° of the curve of the planet. From north to south, a degree of longitude at the latitude of Inverness is fifty-nine kilometres and the same at Madrid’s latitude is eighty-five, nearly half as long again. Most of the area is on land but the biggest area of water is the Celtic Sea and the Bay of Biscay.

I feel a sense of being at home within this irregular hexagon, but more towards the northwest than in other directions. Italy and Spain appeal to me but they don’t feel like my native land, but I think of myself as primarily a White Northwestern European, and by that I include the British Isles, Low Countries, northern part of France, Denmark and the German-speaking countries. I don’t get more specific than that, except that I feel duty-bound to learn Gàidhlig due to my heritage and the fact that it’s endangered. Through that, I feel I should make a connection with the musical tradition of the Q-Celtic areas. I think of Q-Celtic as a linguistic continuum stretching from southwest Ireland to northern Scotland interrupted by speakers mainly of Anglic languages historically. However, I also have it in perspective and am aware that there are many more speakers of Urdu and other North Indian languages in these isles than all of the Q-Celtic speakers put together. I’m also dubious about the idea of Celtic identity and about the idea that Celtic identity is dubious. Nonetheless, every living native speaker of a Celtic language has ancestry within this hexagon, and also every living first language Basque speaker. No other language family or sub-family is represented here in this way. It also contains an unusually large number of imperial capitals with all the dubiosity that carries with it: Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, Brussels and just barely Amsterdam, which is twenty kilometres from the line between Innsbruck and Aberdeen. The so-called “Golden Triangle” of wealth within Europe, which seems no longer to be recognised, is partly outside it.

That’s it really. That’s the area I have direct and contiguous experience of, not separated by air travel. I think this is important because it gives me some kind of inkling of the size of the planet, its shape and its connections. It would be increasingly difficult to grasp a larger area of this kind, and much harder to travel on the surface through it.

The soul travels at the pace of a camel.