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.