Swallow, Lincolnshire

Swallow
Lincolnshire
Holy Trinity Church, Swallow
Location
Grid reference:	TA177030
Location:	53°30’38"N, 0°13’35"W
Data
Population:	289  (2011)
Post town:	Market Rasen
Postcode:	LN7
Local Government
Council:	West Lindsey
Parliamentary constituency:	Gainsborough

Swallow is a small village in Lindsey, the northern part of Lincolnshire, on the A46 road four miles north-east of Caistor. The population (including Cabourne and Cuxwold) taken at the 2011 census was 289.

The name 'Swallow' has been variously recorded as Sualan (in the Domesday Book), Suawa, Swalwe and Swalewe (all twelfth century). The Oxford Dictionary of Place Names equates the name with Swale, suggesting that the village is called after a fast-moving river of that name, with ea being Old English for 'river'. Bob Willey, who used to live in the village, put forward the theory that it is closer to the German schwall, meaning "flood" and suggesting that water gathered on the clay bottom land below the fast-draining chalky hills.

Church

The parish church, Holy Trinity, is an early building: the oldest part of the structure is Norman or possibly earlier. The lower portion of the tower is in Saxo-Norman style; the west door has a rounded Romanesque arch, as has the window above it. The much wider arch dividing the tower from the nave has typically Norman dog-tooth carving, but this may be partly or wholly Victorian restoration.

A carving on the south wall of the tower may be part of the original 14th-century rood, thought to be broken during the Reformation. William Andrew, the rector from 1564 to 1612, supported the reformation and may have been responsible both for this and for the change of dedication from St Salvatoris ("Saint Saviour") to Holy Trinity. The remains of the rood were unearthed in the churchyard and placed in the tower early in the 20th century.

In 1553 the church was reported to have three "gert bells" and one sanctus bell. However, the steeple collapsed sometime before 1663, and falling bells destroyed the south aisle. In 1670 both aisles were demolished (the north aisle having apparently been ruinous even before the collapse) and the following year the three bells were sold to cover the £140 cost of demolition and restoration, an incident referred to in the local rhyme:

"You must pity poor Swallow People

Who sold the bells to mend the steeple"

Sir Philip Tyrwhitt, who paid the cost initially, reportedly bought one bell and undertook to buy another. The bell was cast by Thomas Warner and Sons of London in 1864. The steeple was again restored in 1868, when the upper part of the tower was built in neo-Norman style.

The nave was originally built in the 13th century, but much of the current construction is Victorian. The carving around the south door dates from the 1880s. The font is genuinely Norman, dating from the late 11th or early 12th century.

The window in the south wall is Edwardian, given in memory of the rector, James Wallis Loft, and his wife.

The north aisle was built during the church's restoration of 1883-84, when the old horse box pews, the gallery and the three-decker pulpit were removed. The pillar was also added at this time. The east window in memory of the Farrow-Bingham family also dates from the 1883 restoration.}

There is no south aisle now, but traces of it and the Lady chapel built in the 13th century can be seen on the exterior of the south wall. The 13th-century chancel was largely rebuilt in 1868 at a cost of £350. Traces of the original doorway can be seen on the exterior of the south wall. The pillar piscina is an example of Norman stonework.

Further major repairs were carried out in 1968 (at a cost of £650) and 1976 (£2,100).

In 1931 Swallow was united with the parish of Cabourne, and in 1979 Swallow with Cabourne was amalgamated with the benefices of Rothwell with Cuxwold, Thoresway with Croxby, and Nettleton as the Swallow Group of Parishes.

History

Early history

Archaeological finds, including flint tools at Swallow Vale Farm, indicate the presence of early settlements in Swallow. Other traces include cropmark traces of four possible barrows, a pit and a boundary ditch on Cuxwold Road, and similar barrows behind Grange Farm and on the eastern edge of the village south of Grimsby Road. Straddling the Limber parish border are the remains of an undated ring ditch in Swallow Wold Wood.

Further finds include Roman pottery and coins, and the apparent remains of a Saxon leather worker. Ridges found in the field above the skeleton are further indications of a pre-Norman conquest settlement.

Middle Ages

The Domesday Book gives little detail for Swallow; at that age thus was a place of fen swamps, isolated from much of the land. It appears to have consisted nevertheless of at least 35 households. The important landowners were Bishop Odo of Bayeux, the Archbishop of York, Count Alan, Roger de Poitou and Alfred of Lincoln.

By the 13th century Count Alan’s manor had passed into the hands of the Lascelles family, who may have been resident landlords and were closely involved with the parish church. Their successors, the Conyers family, were certainly non-resident. From around 1200 the manor of Swallow was held by the Augustinian abbey of Wellow in Grimsby. The Cistercian nuns of Nuncotham also had a holding, as did Thornton Abbey and St Leonard’s Priory in Grimsby, until the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

In 1530 George St. Pol bought the former Lascelles Manor, and in 1543 he acquired the former abbey lands from John Bellewe and Robert Brocklesby, to whom they had been granted following the Dissolution.

A survey in the early 14th recorded that Swallow had 26 households and 31 taxpayers, while a Poll Tax count in 1372 found 110 people over the age of fourteen. There were 18 taxpayers in 1525 but only 12 in 1543, and 20 households in 1563. These numbers remained fairly constant for the next three centuries.

Apart from the church, there are no obvious reminders of the mediæval village. On closer examination, a few earthworks show a village of two centres. To the west there was a series of narrow closes and yards fronting Caistor Road with a back lane near where the present A46 runs. This and the ploughing strips are cut through by the much later Limber Road. Towards the end of the mediæval period there were further closes on the south side of the road running down to the stream.

The Eastern Settlement shows signs of one or more monastic farms, a moated manor site and a mill.

Enclosure

Swallow's common fields were inclosed by a private Act of Parliament in 1805, the award completed in 1809. Apart from two small parcels awarded to the Bishop of Lincoln and Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Rector’s Glebe of 96 acres, virtually all the land was awarded to Lord Yarborough. The Rector received corn rents in lieu of tithes. There were also about 65 acres in the village and around the church which were old enclosure, and 4 acres were for roads.

Within a few years, farms which still exist today - Vale, Wold, Mount, Grange and Rookery - had been built. Hedges were planted, new roads and lanes were built, and Lord Yarborough had begun the tree planting which so radically altered the countryside. The change also led to the replacement of Swallow's simple, single-storey houses of mud and stud with brick cottages: the majority of those on Grimsby Road and Chapel Lane being built around 1875. Of the 45 houses in Swallow listed in the 1881 census, about two-thirds survive.

In early 2008, a housing development project was completed in the village on the meadow by the beck.

About the village

The village pub is the Swallow Inn.

The Old Rectory, now a private residence, was built in 1864 to a design by James Fowler of Louth, the diocesan architect, at a cost of £1,700. Unlike the farmhouses, which were all built in variations on the vernacular style, it is clearly identifiable as a mid-Victorian building with its Gothic ornamentation.

The present rectory, built on Beelsby Road in 1958, is a more modest building in post-war style.

Chapels

As in many Lincolnshire villages in the 19th century, the people of Swallow practiced Methodism. A Primitive Methodist chapel was built in 1844 for £98, on a site on the Cuxwold Road donated by Lord Yarborough. In 1855 it was enlarged, but thereafter congregations declined and it closed in 1916. The building was eventually demolished in 1994.

A larger Wesleyan chapel was built on the north side of Back Lane (subsequently Chapel Lane) in 1863. It was designed to hold a congregation of 140, although membership never rose above 40. The chapel closed in 1967 and was demolished shortly afterwards, although a small fragment of the wall's base remains.

Housing since the Second World War

After the Second World War, Swallow saw a number of changes. Like many similar villages, it became less of an estate village and more of a commuter-cum-retirement village with a number of cottages passing into private hands as the more intensive and mechanised agriculture necessitated by the need to feed the country during the war made them redundant as the homes of farm labourers. Only in the 1970s did the Parish Registers begin to show any real variety of trades and professions.

From 1965 parcels of land were sold for building, and since then new houses have been built at the rate of about one a year in a wide variety of styles and materials.^{[citation needed]}

Outside links

("Wikimedia Commons" has material about Swallow, Lincolnshire)