|
A
BRIEF HISTORY of SWALLOW by Clarissa
M. Turner
SWALLOW
AND THE MIDDLE AGES The
name Swallow has been variously written as Sualan
(Doomsday Book), Suawa, Swalwe and
Swalewe (all twelfth century). Most
people seem to agree that the name derives from the
Old Norse svel - - meaning
‘to move dartingly’ (the same derivation as the
bird name), The compilers of THE OXFORD
DICTIONARY OF PLACE NAMES equate it with Swale,
suggesting that the village is called after a fast
moving river of that name with eau being
Norman French for water; however unless Swallow’s beck
has changed dramatically in the last millennium this
theory would seem somewhat difficult to substantiate!
Others believe that the root is the Old
English swillan ‘to wash’. Bob
Willey, who used to live in the village, put forward
the theory that it is closer to the German schwall
‘flood’ in meaning suggesting that
water gathered on the clay bottom land below the
fast-draining chalky hills. Another theory suggests
that the first part of the name could be Celtic deity
Sul from the same source as Aqua
Sulis (Bath). On the other hand, for
generations teachers at the village school told
children that the name came about because the water
here was swallowed into the ground. Swallow
doesn’t get much of a mention in the Doomsday Book,
but in 1086 Lincolnshire seemed very remote from
the rest of the kingdom, cut off from the south by the
undrained and almost impassable Fens, and occupied by
hostile and rebellious Danes (Vikings). In fact,
Lincolnshire was never much like the rest of the
country under Norman rule: many of the peasants were
free as they had been under Danelaw, not villeins
(slaves) as they were under the Feudal System, and
many of the overlords were Breton or - even - Danish
rather than Norman. So, it is hardly surprising that
by the time they reached Lincolnshire some of the
compilers of the Doomsday book were somewhat sketchy
in their researches compared with further south. In Swallow the important landowners were
Norman (the Bishop of Bayeux was William the
Conqueror’s brother), but the least important in the
Norman hierarchy, but those most likely to be actually
resident in the village have distinctly Anglo-Danish
names. Sualan:
Archbishop of York; Bishop of Bayeux; Count Alan and
Picot from him; Roger de Poitou and Wimond from him;
Alfred of Lincoln.
SYNOPSIS from the DOOMSDAY BOOK Throughout
the Middle Ages the manorial tenure of Swallow is
complex, not to say confused!
By the thirteenth 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. However, their
successors, the Conyers family, were certainly
non-resident. From
around 1200 the Manor of Swallow was held by the
Augustiian Abbey of Wellow in Grimsby, and the
Cistercian Nuns of Nuncotham also had a holding, and
by the time of the Reformation Thornton Abbey and S.
Leonard’s Priory (Grimsby) also had lands in Swallow.
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 a year previously following the
Dissolution. In
1086 Swallow consisted of at least 35 households, with
26 and 31 taxpayers recorded in the early fourteenth
century, with a Poll Tax count of 110 people over the
age of fourteen in 1372. 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, although the number of communicants
dropped from 76 in 1603 to 45 in 1676 which could
indicate a drop in population but is more likely to
be a result of political/religious change.) Apart
from the Church, there is little to see of the
Mediaeval village. A few earthworks visible only to
the trained eye 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 mediaeval period there were further closes
on the South side of the road running down to the
stream. Chapel
Lane may also lie along the route of a mediaeval
village street, but nineteenth century farming and
twentieth century building have virtually obliterated
any conclusive evidence. The Eastern Settlement shows signs of one or
more monastic farms, a moated manor site and a mill.
It seems possible that there were no buildings along
the Beelsby Road until after Enclosure (1809). There have been
several interesting archaeological finds in Swallow, including
. . . Assorted
Flint Tools (Swallow Vale Farm) Great
Langdale Stone Axe (Field next to Old Rectory) Roman
Pottery, Coins and a Brooch (Rookery Farm) Roman
Bronze Coin (Near Church) Roman-British
Pottery (Opposite Grange Farm) Mediaeval
Pottery and Coins (Rookery Farm) Mediaeval
Pilgrim Badge (Swallow Vale Farm) As
well as the artefacts there are some traces of early
settlements. On the Cuxwold Road
cropmark traces of four possible barrows, a pit
and a boundary ditch have been observed, with 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. The
most interesting find of recent times was a skeleton
unearthed when a drain was being dug at Wold Farm.
Examination of his jawbone showed him to be a Saxon
leather worker. There are some interesting ridges in
the field above where he was found which may be
indicative of some sort of lost pre-conquest
settlement. To the children on the farm the most
intriguing notion is that there was somebody making
bridles and harness on the very spot where a thousand
years later they keep their ponies. THE
CHURCH The
only apparent mention of the Church in the Doomsday
book is unclear whether it is referring to Swallow or
to some other church since Ralph de Mortemar had
property in both Swallow and Grimsby. However, the
oldest part of it undoubtedly dates from that period
or even a little earlier. The lower portion of the Tower
is in the Saxo-Norman style; the small 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. On
the south wall of the tower there is a carving which
may be part of the original
fourteenth century Rood. This was probably
broken up at the time of the Reformation. William
Andrew, the Rector from 1564 to 1612, was a firm
supporter of reform and may well have been responsible
both for this and for the change of dedication from S.
Salvatoris (Saint Saviour) to Holy Trinity. The
remains of the Rood were unearthed in the churchyard
and placed in the tower early in the twentieth century
by someone with antiquarian interests . In
1553 Swallow Church was reported to have three ‘gert
bells’ and one sanctus bell, but just over a
century later things were sadly changed. You
must pity poor Swallow People Who
sold the bells to mend the steeple
runs a local rhyme. This
refers to the collapse of the tower sometime before
1663 when the steeple and bells fell destroying the
South Aisle. In 1670 both aisles were demolished (the
North Aisle being reported as ruinous even before the
collapse) and the following year the ‘three riven
bells’ were sold to defray the £140 costs of
demolition and restoration to Sir Philip Tyrwhitt.
Sir Philip is at the time reported to have bought
one bell and promised faithfully to buy another. Of
these bells there is no trace. The single extant bell
was cast by Thos. Warner and Sons of London in 1864. Did
history repeat itself in 1700? Or is the story of the
steeple blowing down and the five bells being sold to
Barrow Church to pay for rebuilding simply a
mis-telling of the earlier and better documented
incident? The
steeple was again restored in 1868 when the upper part
of the tower was built in the neo-norman style. The
Nave was originally built in the thirteenth
century, but much of what we see today is Victorian
restoration. The carving around the south door dates
from the 1880s, but may be a copy of the original
tympanum. The Font, however is genuinely
Norman dating from the late eleventh or early twelfth
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 restoration of
1883-4 when the old horse box pews, the
gallery and the three decker pulpit were removed. The
pillar was added at this time, but may be of reused
stone as it appears to have early masons’ marks and/or
graffiti faintly on its surface. There
is no South Aisle now, but traces of it and
the Lady Chapel built in the thirteenth
century can be seen on the exterior of the south wall. The
thirteenth century Chancel was largely rebuilt
in 1868 at a cost of £350. Again, traces of the
original doorway can be seen on the exterior of the
south wall. The Pillar Piscina is a lovely
example of Norman stonework. The
East Window in memory of the Farrow/Bingham family
dates from the 1883 restoration and shows very clearly
the excellent and, until recently, undervalued quality
of Victorian craftsmanship. Less good is the spelling.
See if you can spot the mistake. There
are several nineteenth century memorial tablets in the
chancel. In
1968 it cost £650 to do the first major repairs since
1884, and a further £2,100 was spent in 1976. Rectors
of Swallow and their Patrons
A
few of Swallow’s Rectors have proved more memorable
than others. J. E. Wallis Loft was a cricketer of
National repute, and Arthur Askey made a comprehensive
study of oral history which has proved invaluable to
later researchers. On the other hand, Watson Foreman
led a tragic life and was a notable drunkard. The
United Benefice 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. The
Churchyard The
churchyard in Swallow has been a burial site for well
over a thousand years, and has not changed much in
either size or shape in all that time. The Turnpike of
1765 cut through some of the ancient (pre-Christian?)
burial ground, and in 1954 a road straightening and
widening scheme on the then A46 took a further slice
of the churchyard replacing the hedged bank with the
distinctive high retaining wall. It
was during these excavations that the famous Swallow
Giant was unearthed - a man 7 feet 2 inches tall (well
over 2 metres), and said by some to be a Viking
Warrior. Unfortunately
the legend proves as usual to be far more interesting
than the truth, and correspondence between the
Reverend Mr. Jacoby and the County Archaeological
Department suggests that, whatever the locals wanted
to believe, scientific measurement of the bones showed
a tall man of between 6 feet and 6 feet 4 inches whose
bones had spread out in the earth as apparently all
skeletons do. In
1970 the eastern and northern parts of the churchyard
were levelled. In theory the old gravestones were
preserved by being placed around the church, but far
too many were damaged or defaced in the process, and
no proper record was kept of their original positions.
A complete survey was made of the remaining graves in
1978. The early 1980s saw a major tidying of both the
churchyard and the neighbouring corner green to remove
rotten trees and facilitate mowing. Since then there has been extensive
tree-planting throughout the village including the
graveyard and green. The Copper Beech was planted to commemorate the opening of the
by-pass, and the seat, flanked by chimney pots from
the demolished Rookery farmhouse, was placed there in
1998. The
Rectory
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. Its
successor, the present rectory, built on Beelsby Road
in 1958 is an altogether more modest house in the
rather drab post-war style. The earlier rectory or
rectories are somewhat mysterious. A County Directory of
1872 states clearly that the rectory dates from 1856 -
presumably a mistake - and that its predecessor was
built in 1834. It has been suggested that this was a
short-lived house on the same plot, though possibly
closer to the road, as the Old Rectory. Another
possibility is that Glebe Farm was originally built as a
rectory. METHODISM As
in many Lincolnshire villages in the nineteenth
century, the people of Swallow embraced Methodism with
fervour. At first they met in private houses, but
later they built two chapels. The
Primitive Methodist Chapel was the first to be
built in 1844 at a cost of £98. Its site on the
Cuxwold Road was donated by the then Lord Yarborough.
In 1855 it had to be enlarged, but thereafter numbers
declined and it closed in 1916. The building remained,
used as a barn and increasingly derelict, until it was
bulldozed in 1994. The Wesleyan Chapel was built on the
north side of Back Lane (subsequently Chapel Lane) in
1863. An altogether more ambitious building than the
Prims’, it was designed to hold a congregation of 140,
although in fact membership never rose above forty.
The chapel closed in 1967 and was demolished shortly
afterwards. A small fragment of the base of the wall
remains between Solitus and Wishing Well. THE
PARISH REGISTERS
The Parish Registers (dating back to 1671
and now kept at Lincoln although there are a number
of transcripts in the village) tell a fairly
typical story of an estate village. It was rare for a
family to remain in the village for more than two
generations, and the majority of labourers would move
on after a few years to get a better job or to leave
farming altogether. Even the better off farmers tended
(being tenants rather than owners) to remain no more
than two or three generations. In
the spring of 1841, during the Hungry Forties,
fourteen children under the age of ten died (about a
quarter of all the children in the village); they came
from seven families, but one of those families lost
five children in the space of a single week. No adults
in the village died that year suggesting that the
epidemic, whatever it was, was a particularly virulent
form of some childhood ailment such as measles,
whooping cough or diphtheria. In
1870 there was another epidemic when six children died
in the space of a month between October 20th and
November 20th. The Rector, Sir Charles McGregor,
records that the last two died of scarlet fever. 1909
saw the burial of an unknown man of about fifty whose
decayed remains had been found in the Jubilee
Plantation after 12
to 2 years exposure. THE
CENSUS The
census provides an interesting snapshot of a rural
population. The census of 1851 shows 127 males and 90
females in 57 households. Ten years later the number
of dwellings had reduced to 41 (hardly more than the
Doomsday level of 35) while the population had risen
by 22 (all female!). Analysis of the 1881 census shows 78% of all
working males in farming, with 16% in allied trades -
92% in total. Of the adults only 10% were born in
Swallow although just three women and no men were born
outside Lincolnshire. Today’s picture would be very different with
fewer than twenty men working the same farms, the
majority of both working men and women employed
outside the village, and residents born not merely
outside the county, but outside the country. ENCLOSURE Swallow
as we know it today dates from the nineteenth century
enclosure. Until 1805 agriculture was based on the Two
Field System, with the majority of villagers
having strips in the two great fields, as well as
grazing rights on the Wold, the Moor and in Horse
Pasture - at least that was the theory. However
from as early as the Tudor period the old system of
agriculture was becoming less viable, and from the
middle of the seventeenth century various Swallow
residents were describing themselves as farmers rather
than cottagers which suggests a degree of
consolidation in their land use. By the end of the
eighteenth century the Agrarian Revolution with its
improved agricultural methods and animal husbandry,
together with the need to move from subsistence
farming to large scale commercial production of food
for the ever growing numbers of city and town dwellers
had combined to make change inevitable. Swallow
was enclosed by parliamentary act in 1805, and the
award was completed in 1809. Apart from two small
parcels awarded to the Bishop of Lincoln and Trinity
College, Cambridge respectively, and the Rector’s
Glebe of 96 acres, virtually all the land in Swallow
was awarded to Lord Yarborough. The corn rents from
what now forms the western halves of Swallow Grange
and Swallow Mount farms were to go to the Rector in
lieu of tithes. There were also about 65 acres in the
village and around the Church which were old
enclosure, and four acres were for roads. Within
a few years the farms we know today - Vale, Wold,
Mount, Grange and Rookery - had been built. Hedges
were planted, new roads and lanes were built (Limber
Road was built at this time to provide access to the
new farms), and Lord Yarborough had begun the tree
planting which so radically altered the countryside. THE
FARMS Swallow
Vale Farm
Swallow
Vale is probably the oldest of the farmhouses, and was
begun even before the Enclosure Award was completed,
the back premises and the cellar still being more
eighteenth than nineteenth century in style. In the
Yarborough Archive at Lincoln there is a sketch plan
for a ‘New House and Yard on Horse Pasture’. This
yard remains almost exactly as it was in 1806 (right
down to the uses of some of the buildings) to this
day. The house was extended and refronted in 1824/5,
and it seems probable that it was at this time the
upper floor of the old house (entered from an external
access ladder) became sleeping quarters for the
farmworkers. A further £2,700 was spent on the farm in
1856/7 when a vast amount of work was done. It was at
this period (1851 to 1866) that Stephen Gibbons, Lord
Yarborough’s steward, lived at Swallow Vale so there
was probably a considerable incentive to make it a
model farm setting a standard for others. He was
succeeded by his wife, Eliza, and briefly by his son
William Robert on her death in 1881, to be followed by
Thomas Kirkby in 1882. In
the twentieth century Swallow Vale has been farmed by
William Wilkinson and Edward Lamming. Since 1967 Basil
Thompson has been the tenant, with his brother, Guy,
and - as each grew up - his sons Denzil and Glenvyl,
and grandson Roger. There
is a story of the murder by her lover of a young
servant girl from the Vale, and his subsequent
suicide, but nothing in the Parish Records seems to
bear this tale out. The
cottages at the Vale show very clearly the progression
of styles in the Yarborough estate cottages. Swallow
Cottage was built about 1830; in the 1960s Fred
Smith bought the pair (one lived in and one derelict)
and converted them into a single dwelling, adding a
large sun-room and garage and demolishing the
wash-house, coal store etc. Like the farmhouse, it is
now Grade 2 listed. The foreman’s cottage was
built around ten years later in a similar style.
Towards the end of the century another pair of
cottages was built; they too were knocked into a one
when the Thompsons took over the farm tenancy in 1967,
and are now called Henholes Cottage after the
wood opposite. Originally the corners were decorated
with rusticated brickwork but this was removed and
re-used in Limber or Brocklesby when the end wall was
rebuilt following subsidence due to the nearby chalk
pit. Finally, the two Swallow Vale Drive cottages were
built in the 1930s. The detached coal store and
wash-house still pertained, but there was now an
integral downstairs bathroom. Swallow
Mount Farm
Swallow
Mount, arguably the grandest of the farmhouses, was
built in the teens of the nineteenth century, and is
now grade 2 listed. It has since the 1930s been farmed
by the Robinsons, as it was by the Willows family for
much of the nineteenth century. The farm’s cottage is
a modern bungalow. Rookery
Farm Rookery
Farm, at 800 acres, was the largest of Swallow’s
nineteenth century farms and flourished throughout the
century under the Borman family. It was sold in 1979
to Sir Richard Sutton Settled Estates. The farm
continues to flourish, but the house, derelict for
many years, was demolished in 1996. It dated primarily
from the 1850s, although earlier maps show buildings
on that site which may have been incorporated into the
later house. The back premises (pictured below) included
an impressive dairy, and dormitories for the itinerant
gangs of seasonal workers for all the farms of the
village. A new house was built on the site in 1996/7. Grange
Farm The
present Grange Farmhouse was
built in 1820, and is said to be a replacement
for an earlier house in the village on the opposite side
of the road. The Farrow family who farmed at Grange make
their first appearance in the Parish Registers in 1747
and were well enough established to be listed as
‘gentleman’ or ‘gentleman farmer’ in various nineteenth
century directories - unusual for a tenant farmer in
those class-ridden days. In 1807 Sarah Farrow married
Thomas Bingham, and the line continued unbroken until
their great-grandson, James Edward Quibell Bingham,
retired in 1970 ending the longest unbroken tenancy on
the history of the Yarborough estate, and when he
personally was the estate’s most senior tenant. He died
in 1996. Grange is now farmed by Michael Kendall and his
sons Daniel and James. The
farm buildings predate the house by several years, and
are of particular interest, especially the hexagonal
pumphouse/horse-gin. The cottages are modern
replacements. Wold
Farm
Wold
has always been the smallest of Swallow’s outlying
farms. In the nineteenth century it was farmed by
members of the Tomlinson family (whose history in
Swallow is almost as long as the Farrow/Binghams), and
then by William Marshall Bucknall. In the 1930s it was
taken over by Ben Wright who ran it as a stud farm.
His wife, Mary, was the daughter of Charles Campion of
Rookery Farm. On Ben’s retirement in the 1980s, the
Thompsons of Vale took over farming the land, and in
1996, following Mary’s death, Glen and Helen Thompson
moved into the house. During
the war Ben Wright was a Home Guard Commando trained
as a resistance fighter should the Germans invade. His
secret hideout can still be seen in the woods if you
know where to look, and spent ammunition can be picked
up. Village
Farm Village
Farm has always been, at about 80 acres, the smallest
of Swallow’s farms, and for generations it was
tenanted by the Tomlinson family which rivals the
Farrow/Binghams for length of time in the village with
the name appearing in this form or as Thominson as
early as 1679 when Elizabeth and Richard Tomlinson
died within a few months of each other, and 1685 when
William Tomlinson (a farmer) married Susannah Odling,
although the line is only directly traceable from
Edward Tomlinson (1748 to 1830) and Sarah, his wife
(1765 to 1839). After Sarah, who was a tenant in her
own right, died, her son Edward is listed in Trade
Directories as a farmer living at Wold, while another
son John was a carpenter and wheelwright living in the
village. The wheelwright’s workshop which was
demolished in the 1960s, had living accommodation
consisting of a room and tiny kitchen with a loft
above not tall enough to stand up in, but with room
enough to lie down to sleep. For three generations,
throughout the nineteenth century, the Robinson family
were carpenters and wheelwrights in the village; in
the 1881 census their address is given as Grimsby Road
so it may be that they were never connected with this
workshop. The
cottage, built in 1839 and now the back premises of
Village farmhouse, still retains the stone sink,
fireplace and ladder up to the bedroom. By
1861 the Tomlinsons had gone from Wold (to be
succeeded by the Bucknalls) and not long after John
was being listed as ‘farmer’ or ‘farmer and
wheelwright’. He was succeeded by his son Alfred, who
died in 1926. The Misses Tomlinson took over the dairy
farm; neither ever married, but one had a live-in
lover because under the terms of a will she would lose
everything if she married! Tomlinson Close was built
on the site of the farmyard in 1949. Ethel, the last
of the Swallow Tomlinsons, died in 1959 aged 73. Glebe
Farm
Glebe
Farm, demolished in 1970, may have been the 1834
rectory. In 1851 the farmer was called Holliwell and
was almost certainly a member of the rector’s family.
It was the only farm in Swallow not to belong to Lord
Yarborough. The site had been occupied since mediaeval
times and can still be identified (opposite Keeper’s
cottage) by the remains of the old orchard and a few
mounds in the field. Glebe’s
history is closely linked with that of
Village Farm, particularly in recent times when
Glebe was farmed by William Dixon from 1939-65, and
then by his sons until Keith and Mary Dixon moved to
Village Farm. Moggs
Hollow
Strictly
speaking Moggs Hollow isn’t in Swallow, but in Irby,
although the neighbouring Copperfield
(Swallow’s only barn conversion) is. Some people
derive the name Moggs Hollow from ‘Monk’s Hollow’, a
reference to the lands of the mediaeval monastic
grange which probably included this site. Some go
further and endow it with a monkish ghost. VILLAGE HOUSES and COTTAGES The
village at the time of Enclosure appears to have been
very scattered; unfortunately the plan gives no
indication as to what are dwellings and what are farm
buildings; nor can the scale be judged accurately with
the distances between known landmarks inconsistent
with modern Ordnance Survey maps. The route of Beelsby
Road is particularly mysterious, but could be no more
than careless draughtsmanship. It appears that at this
time there were still houses along Caistor Road where
the crofts of mediaeval times had been. Village
houses at enclosure and for some time afterwards would
have been simple one storey buildings of mud and
stud. The brick tied cottages of the Yarborough
Estate gradually replaced these older dwellings, with
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. Shops
in Swallow In
1976 the last Post-Office-cum Village-Shop in Swallow
finally closed, beaten by the motor car and
supermarkets, leaving the less mobile villagers
reliant upon occasional buses and good neighbours. The
earliest recorded shop in the village was at the Forge
in 1856, and it had become a post-office by 1889.
Presumably the blacksmiths starting with John Lawrence, then Charles
Henry Brown, and finally John James Johnson
saw
the running of a shop as a useful augmentation of
income as more farm implements were mass produced,
although his services both for repairs and as a
farrier would have continued in great demand until
well into the next century. The success of the
business may be judged by the size and quality of
Forge House which is predominantly nineteenth
century, although parts of it may date from the
eighteenth century. Many of the shop fittings remained
in situ until the early 1970s when Geoff Baxter
removed them from his dining room to his studio and
store-room. The forge also seems to have had some land
attached as these shopkeeper/blacksmiths are
frequently referred to as ‘farmer’; according to the
1881 census C. H. Brown farmed 105 acres of ‘Brown’s
Farm’. The
next shop was a tobacconist’s kiosk near Crossroads
Cottages which was somewhat surprisingly run for a
time by the Reverend Mr. Askey’s son. The remains of
this building can still be seen in the garden of no.8
Grimsby Road - Mrs. Holloway’s. Swallow’s
penultimate shop was the post-office in Chapel Lane at
number 1 Cottage (now the Watsons’ house).
Until the recent extension (1998/9) it was possible to
see marks in the brickwork where the post-box used to
be. After a brutal robbery and assault on the Post
Mistress, Fanny Hanson, in 1958 a new shop was built
at the corner of Cuxwold Road and Chapel Lane (now
Maple Tree Bungalow) opening in 1961. The
Pub In
1953 the old pub, The White Hart (now
Keeper’s Cottage), closed, to be replaced by the
much larger pub and restaurant, The Swallow Inn.
Although popular with the locals, it was passing trade from the
A46 upon which the Swallow Inn relied initially until
its reputation made it the hostelry of choice for
people from a wide area around. It
is hard to imagine the tiny White Hart doing much
casual trade except when a cast shoe or broken axle
necessitated a lengthy unplanned wait in Swallow. Even
among villagers trade cannot have been thriving in
days when pubs were predominantly a male preserve and
half the adult population of the village were
Methodists, leaving a maximum regular clientele of
perhaps thirty. It had a six day licence, and was
presumably dry on Sundays. Small wonder that the
innkeeper frequently had a secondary trade to support
him. In 1882 Mr. Osburn was doubling as innkeeper and
wheelwright, and its time as a saddler’s workshop
remains quite strongly in evidence with offcuts of
leather and broken tools still frequently dug up in
the garden. Houses
since the 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. It isn’t until the 1970s that 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. All have been built on good sized plots
and enjoy open views on at least one aspect. THE
VILLAGE POND In
1949 Arthur Mee wrote:- SWALLOW:
In a pretty Wold valley it lies, between Caistor and
Grimsby, serene with its pond by the green; a
delightful little avenue leading to one of its
houses, and a tiny church on a high bank.
The King’s England - Lincolnshire The
Church and the avenue remain, although the house
(Rookery) is gone, and the high bank is largely
replaced by a retaining wall, and the pond was filled
in during the 1960s and the land sold to make a garden
for Pond Cottage. The site now has a modern house on
it. The
reasons for filling in the pond are somewhat obscure.
The most prosaic reason given is that as the water
table dropped, the pond, always shallow, simply became
dry for most of the year, and was filled in as a
logical part of Mr. Metcalfe’s garden plan. More
interesting (and borne out by newspaper cuttings of
the time) is the story that the then rector, A. W. T.
Nestor, had spent some part of his life in India and
was in mortal dread of a typhoid outbreak. Until
1949 the village was served by a parish pump near to
the entrance to the present playing field,
and you had to be up by 5 o’clock on Monday
washday to be sure of sufficient water, although many
houses had - and still have - their own wells. Rookery
Farm’s water was pumped by a windmill which also seems
to have served a pump on Grimsby Road.
In 1949 piped water came to the village, pumped
from Barnoldby and then fed to Swallow by gravity from
Beelsby Top. Electricity followed in 1950. Mains
sewerage did not arrive until 1970, and mains gas
later still. Outlying houses are still served by
septic tanks and are without gas, although most now
have mains water. ROADS
AROUND SWALLOW Prior
to the Grimsby Turnpike Act of 1765 the road (track)
through Swallow seems to have followed a line close to
Chapel Lane; a green road ran from Swallow to Rothwell
until the Second World War when it was ploughed up to
grow crops and never re-instated. The new turnpike
road cut through the ancient burial ground and tolls were paid to travel along it. In
1954 a road straightening and widening scheme on the
then A46 (Caistor Road) through the village took a
further part of the churchyard, and during these
excavations the skeleton of the Swallow Giant
was unearthed.
(see Churchyard section) For years a traffic roundabout at the
cross-roads was promised, but nothing ever came of it. After
many years - and far too many fatal accidents on a
road far too narrow and meandering for fast heavy
modern traffic - Swallow got its by-pass in 1992 (at
the expense of one healthy mature tree, but rather a
lot of good farmland and hedgerow, and the football
field) and Grimsby Road and Caistor Road became quiet
cul-de-sacs. At long last it became safe for even
quite young children to walk or cycle unattended to
visit friends or relatives on the other side of the
village, or to go to the playing field, or even play a
game of street football. THE
SCHOOL and VILLAGE HALL Prior
to 1856 there must have been some sort of Dame School
as the census for 1851 lists village children (not
only those of the Rector and the more prosperous
farmers and tradesmen) as ‘scholar’. This school - so
called - may have been little more than a childminding
service as many ‘teachers’ of the time were themselves
all but illiterate. The
new school was built at the expense of the then Lord
Yarborough in 1856 for the benefit of the children of
his estate workers, tenants, and their employees. The
headmistress of the new school was Miss Mary Ann
Whitworth. five years later Miss Lucy-Ann Chatterton
was the schoolmistress, to be followed by Miss Sophia
Swan in 1876 By
1881, when the school registers begin, Mrs. Maria
Unwin was headmistress, and the first pupil on the
roll was Henry Alfred Robinson; eighty-seven years
later the final admission, Sharon Redfearn was number
1,068. Teaching at a village school in the early days
must have been incredibly difficult with the children
of itinerant workers registered for just a few weeks,
and the majority of labourers’ children remaining for
no more than a year or so.
Initially, the school seems to have consisted
of a single room, but early in the twentieth century
an infant classroom and cloakrooms were added to the
west, and the main entrance appears to have been moved
from the north to the south side. Although
Swallow was a two classroom school for about fifty
years, numbers fluctuated considerably; in 1941, when
the only extant school log begins, it was a one
teacher school, and was again on many subsequent
occasions. November 1948 brought an excellent report
from the School Inspectors citing Swallow as a model
for Rural One Teacher Schools; less than a year later
Miss Marris was appointed assistant to Miss Frances
Cox. On November 4th 1949, the school was on display
when Mr.D.R.Hardman, Parliamentary Secretary to the
Minister of education, visited. In June 1946
work began on installing a school kitchen, but in July
1949, following a huge intake of ten new pupils, the
canteen became the infant classroom and the end
cloakroom the cookhouse. In January 1959 it was agreed
to dispense with the services of a cook and have meals
sent from the central canteen. A year later
this was reported as being satisfactory. The school appears to have
been closed on somewhat flimsy grounds. It was small,
but - with twenty-four children - still within the
bounds of viability, and the buildings were in good
condition; the only problem seems to have been getting
a teacher to stay. The school was closed in May 1968
and the children transferred to Caistor Primary School
where they had to join existing classes, in some cases
for just one term before going up to secondary school.
The whole process appears to have caused some
considerable disquiet in the village, and a number of
mothers kept their children from school for a period
because of the inadequate transport arrangements. It
wasn’t the first time that Swallow children had been
sent to Caistor; from March 31st to November 30th
1945, following the illness and resignation of Miss
Joan Marrows as Headmistress, Swallow School was
closed. Maybe
in 1968 parents hoped that enough fuss would make the
closure temporary as in 1945. The Final Class Glenvyl Arthur
Thompson
Valerie Ann Hammond
Deborah Elizabeth
Dixon Michael
Melton
Elaine Hewson
Rosemary Baldock Paul
Hammond
Ruth Lidgett
Susan Ann Metcalf Michael
Goddard
Pat Welton
Sharon Redfearn Paul Whillock Susan Dixon Mark
Richards
Caroline Ann Baldock Andrew
Keith Dixon
Jacqueline Karen Newsom Timothy
James Winn
Marie Ann Ritson Frazer Matthew Melton Pauline Janet Metcalf David
John Ritson
Susan Margaret Baldock After
the school closed the ownership of the building
reverted to Lord Yarborough, and in 1969 he sold it to
the village for a nominal £150 on condition that it
would be returned to him if it could not be maintained
as a village hall for twenty-one years. In
1990 it was handed over to the village, the Parish
Council (which meets in the hall bi-monthly) taking
over the trusteeship shortly thereafter together with
responsibility for the day to day running expenses,
leaving the Village Hall Committee to raise money for
capital projects. There is an irregular programme of
talks, quizzes and demonstrations on a roughly monthly
basis from September to May. Most years also see one
or more major events - the Craft and Garden Show, an
exhibition, or a traditional village fete (usually in
conjunction with the Church). The Harvest Supper run
by the Church is one of the year’s most popular
events. Recently an extension was built to house a
bar. The Village Hall Committee is also responsible
for maintaining the Playing Field for which the Parish
Council pays Sutton Estates a quarterly peppercorn
rent. The swings were given by Quibell Bingham when he
retired in 1970, and the other play equipment was paid
for by fund-raising events in the 1990s. |