2024 PROGRAMME
Our lectures and visits in 2024
The lectures in 2024 will be held either in the Methodist Church in Nichol Hill, LN11 9NQ, or online using Zoom. Visitors or members may request a Zoom link by emailing start.david@btinternet.com.
The lectures in 2024 will be held either in the Methodist Church in Nichol Hill, LN11 9NQ, or online using Zoom. Visitors or members may request a Zoom link by emailing start.david@btinternet.com.
Tuesday 15th October 2024, 10 am to 1 pm.
Lisa Brundle of the Lincolnshire Portable Antiquities Scheme will be holding a “Finds Day” in Louth Museum.
Members of the public are invited to bring in items for identification and recording, particularly old metal items that have been discovered in the ground. This service is free, but a monetary donation to support the work of the museum would be appreciated.
https://finds.org.uk/counties/lincolnshire/team/
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
In 1995 Brian ‘retired’ from his previous employment as a bus driver and started courses at the Nottingham WEA, mostly in history, before entering the School of Continuing Education at the University of Nottingham. This ultimately led to a PhD (2013) on the subject of the dissolution of the monasteries in Lincolnshire.
Today the term Purgatory refers to an unpleasant situation that is both lengthy and unavoidable, e.g., contacting a utility company by phone. In the Medieval period however, Purgatory was much more consequential. According to Church doctrine, Purgatory was believed by Christians to be an intermediate state between Heaven and Hell, where souls were painfully cleansed of unconfessed sins and uncompleted penance prior to the Day of Judgement. The Church did little to disabuse parishioners that, other than its assured conclusion, the purgatorial process was nothing other than lengthy, tortuous and harrowing. This talk will discuss the history of Purgatory and its gradual progression to become officially acknowledged as Church doctrine. Also considered will be the emergence of the concept of indulgences, designed to reduce time spent in Purgatorium; a process finally outlawed in England by Henry VIII as part of the Reformation process.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Stuart is the former CEO of the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust; Trustee of the Sir Joseph Banks Society; Secretary of the Lincolnshire Branch of the Betjeman Society; and member of the Advisory Committees for Snipe Dales and Gibraltar Point Nature Reserves.
The Sir Joseph Banks Society has unearthed a stunning collection of botanical paintings in a cloth bag where they had lain undisturbed for over a century. They are the work of Wyberton born May Lane-Claypon who married Revd E M Cheales of Friskney. May had trained at the Slade School of Art and also in Germany. A knowledgeable botanist from an early age, she developed a passion for illustrating the wild flowers and fungi she found growing around her home. In later life she turned her talent to portrait and landscape painting and religious subjects for Friskney church. Our speaker will illustrate her talents.
The Burgess collection consists of a large number of postcard sized plant watercolours arranged by botanical family. The watercolours were painted by Dr. J. T. Burgess of Spilsby, Lincolnshire in the 1890s and donated by Miss Norah B. Burgess (his daughter) in July, 1955 to the Lincolnshire Naturalists’ Union. In 2021 the collection was transferred to the Sir Joseph Banks Society for cataloguing and digitisation.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Denise is one of the founder members of the Spirit of Sutterby, a community heritage project which has been running now for nine years. The project is based on the tiny church and Deserted Mediaeval Village of Sutterby in the Lincolnshire Wolds and has gathered people and skills to enable a wide range of research into the history of Sutterby and its archaeological landscape.
One of the most curious episodes of Georgian church provision in Lincolnshire concerns the Fen Chapels built between 1812-1840. Built as a direct result of the draining of the last three Lincolnshire Fens - East Fen, West Fen and Wildmore Fen – theirs is an interesting, yet salutary tale.
Meet at 6:30pm in the Northgate Car Park (next to the British Legion). Finish at St James’ Church. Duration about 1¼ hours.
The cost of the walk is £5 per adult, accompanied children free. To secure a place on this walk, come to Louth Museum and pay the £5 booking fee. Numbers on each walk are limited, so if you arrive at the starting point of the walk without a prior booking, you will be allowed to join only if spaces are available. Louth Museum is open Wednesdays to Saturdays, 10 am to 4 pm.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Nicholas was the Keeper of the City and County Museum in Lincoln from 1970-75 and then the Curator of the Grosvenor Museum in Chester until 1990. After this he joined his wife Eva‘s antiquarian bookselling business and they moved to Mid Wales, where they specialised in selling books on Archaeology, Architecture and Wales. Moving back to Lincoln in 2016 he has become very active in the Society for Lincolnshire History and Archaeology and in the Local List Group, which works with the Lincoln City Council in compiling a list of buildings and heritage assets that are not covered by Statutory Listing.
Born in Louth in 1822, Pearson Bellamy trained as an architect under William Adams Nicholson in Lincoln and also in Manchester and Liverpool. He returned in 1845, setting up a practice in Lincoln, but also having an office in his parents’ house in Upgate, Louth. Until the early 1860s he was designing nearly all the new buildings in Louth. These included the Louth Town Hall, the rebuilding of the Mansion House, the Corn Exchange, Cemetery Chapels and the Free Methodist Chapel, many new shops and numerous houses. But c1860 he ceased to work in Louth, though his work elsewhere blossomed with the building of Ipswich, Grimsby, and Retford Town Halls, many buildings in Lincoln, impressive Corn Exchanges, and cemetery and Methodist chapels, in an area stretching from Lancashire and Cheshire to Hertfordshire and even to Jersey. There are traces of friction with James Fowler from the building of Louth Town Hall, then Grimsby Town Hall, which was supposed to be jointly designed, but Fowler withdrew. Finally, there was a very public dispute in 1869 with Fowler over the costings for St Swithin’s Church in Lincoln.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Mark Gardiner has worked in University College London (where he was the Deputy Director of Archaeology South-East) and Queen’s University Belfast (where he was joint head of Archaeology-Palaeoecology). He is currently Professor of Medieval Archaeology at the University of Lincoln and Director of Lincoln Conservation. He has particular research interests in medieval buildings and in the twelfth-century peasantry in Lincolnshire. Publications include over 130 papers on aspects of the archaeology of the Middle Ages and five edited books.
Few timber buildings survive in Lincolnshire from the Middle Ages. Outside the towns of Lincoln, Grantham and Boston, it is hard to find more than one or two buildings remaining in most areas of the county. Compared to other counties in the Midlands, this is a depressingly sparse record. However, recent work has begun to identify some remarkable surviving structures and has begun to fill in the enormous gaps in our understanding. The talk examines why we have lost so many medieval buildings, and some of the extraordinary structures which still remain. From these fragments, we can begin to identify the character of medieval Lincolnshire houses.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Jim’s research examines the literary and visual culture of the nineteenth century and thematically is centred on Victorian medievalism. He has worked on stained glass, the Gothic Revival and publishing history especially the literary and material culture surrounding the career of Alfred Tennyson including a recent monograph about Edward Moxon (Tennyson’s publisher) and his impact on Victorian poetry. He is currently working on chapters for the Oxford Handbook of Victorian medievalism (‘Civil and Domestic Design’), the Routledge Companion to William Morris (‘Stained Glass’) and the Bloomsbury Cultural History of the Interior 1800-1920 (‘Public Buildings’). He works closely with colleagues in the Conservation subject area on object analysis and interpretation and acts as Historical Consultant to Lincoln Conservation.
This lecture will be held in Louth Methodist Church, Nichol Hill.
Lynda grew up on a farm near Louth and read history at Edinburgh University. She spent forty years in America and is professor emerita of history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She has published books and articles on the history of surgery and gender. Before becoming an academic, Lynda had careers as a social worker in the UK, and as a respiratory therapist and trauma nurse in the US. In 2020 she and her American husband retired to Grimoldby. Lynda was appointed Chair of the Volunteers at Louth Museum in 2023.
This talk focuses on the fifteen children of Ann and Dan Gresswell (veterinary surgeon and Louth mayor in 1871) for what their stories can tell us about the desire for professional education and long-distance travel in Victorian Louth. The Gresswell siblings included veterinarians, lunatic asylum attendants and infectious disease doctors, several of whom studied and lived in the Middle East, South Africa and Australia. Some wrote books on topics such as the ox and the horse, snake venom and spirituality, and there is even a fairy tale romance about evolution by two of the brothers. Although they may be largely forgotten today, the Gresswells were among Louth’s leading families 150 years ago and theirs is a tale worth telling.